On 2017's TFCF and the following year's Titles with the Word Fountain, Liars' Angus Andrew took isolation to extremes. As the project's solitary member, he sounded deeply alone and engulfed by himself on songs that were elliptical even by Liars' standards. Andrew changes course once again on The Apple Drop, an album that builds on Liars' longtime strengths and recurring themes with a notably different approach. Joined by a small handful of collaborators -- former High Places member Mary Pearson Andrew, avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike, and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell -- Andrew gives Liars' tenth album a sweeping scope. Even when the project was a four-piece band during the They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top days, Liars rarely sounded as massive as they do on tracks like "The Start," a gliding expanse punctuated by prickly electronics that serve as the main link to their immediately prior work. Live instrumentation gives Liars' music a heft it hasn't had since 2007's self-titled album, but this time their version of rock often shares more with classic prog or art rock than with their post-punk foundations. This is particularly true of "Big Appetite," a lumbering, psychedelic standout that provides one of many showcases for Pike's stickwork, and of the Floyd-ian spaciness of "From What the Never Was."

1		The Start
2		Slow and Turn Inward
3		Sekwar
4		Big Appetite
5		From What the Never Was
6		Star Search
7		My Pulse to Ponder
8		Leisure War
9		King of the Crooks
10		Acid Crop
11		New Planets New Undoings

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