Grouper

With Ruins, Portland's Grouper (aka Liz Harris) released one of the most quietly powerful albums of 2014. Its songs are full of contradictions, at once painfully intimate and far reaching; tenderly hushed and wholly enveloping; tragically flawed and wilfully assured. It's an album about what it means to be a human being, full of parts that shouldn't match but whose collusion makes each of us singular. Best listened to alone on a snowy day.