Shreveport, Louisiana is not a city that typically colonises the imagination of those searching for the next seismic shift in alternative music. It is a place more readily associated with oil refineries and Texas heat than with the kind of confessional, guitar-sparse introspection that has long been the domain of Portland basements and Brooklyn loft apartments. And yet here comes Jared Trahan — operating under the quietly devastating moniker The Forever Takeback — arriving without fanfare, without a label, without even a bandmate to share the existential weight, and delivering something that lodges itself beneath the ribcage like a splinter you cannot quite reach.

Some bands announce themselves. Dead Summer detonate themselves. "Take It or Leave It," the opening salvo from Nate Prevedoros and Michael Wilford, is the kind of record that doesn't politely introduce itself at the door — it kicks the door clean off its hinges, walks straight to your record player, and dares you to object.

Rock music's most persistent lie is the one it tells about spontaneity — the myth that the best recordings arrive fully formed, blurted into a microphone at two in the morning between cigarettes, raw and reckless and magnificent. Casey Brandt and Jason Fletcher, the two men who constitute Mattock, have spent enough years in enough rooms — CBGB's sweat-soaked floors, the cluttered rehearsal spaces of the DMV scene — to know better. "Daughters," the title track from their sophomore album, is a record that understands the difference between rawness and carelessness. It has the former in abundance. It contains none of the latter.