Palace

We tend to think of fear as a bad thing; as something that lurks inside us and rears its head only at the worst moments. But on Palace’s third album, Shoals, the band sought that feeling out, faced it down and tackled it in all its guises. From skittering anxiety to dead-of-night dread, from fears about the self to universal, existential threats, Shoalsswells and crashes around the cloying, unsettling emotion and finds its way to a sort of peace and healing; the resolution that fear can be good for us, that we live with it for a reason. “It's almost a bit of a love letter to fear and feeling fear, and to people who experience fear in any form,” says Leo Wyndham, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist.