Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.

Every so often a record arrives that refuses the tidy grammar of pop songwriting and insists on its own strange logic instead. "My Morbid Reverie" is one of those records — a single that behaves less like a hook-driven statement and more like a confession caught halfway between speech and dream.

Grief rarely announces itself with drama. More often it arrives as a kind of administrative oddity — the chair still pulled out at the same angle, the mug still hanging on its hook, the world stubbornly refusing to redecorate itself around a hole that's just appeared in it. Koen Ruiter, the Utrecht-trained songwriter who records as Koentakhinte, understands this instinctively, and "When You're Not Here" is built entirely from that understanding.

Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.