From the album’s first heady drumbeat to its final ambient drones, Grouper’s Ruins plunges its audience into a landscape of textured aural haze. What begins as emotionally rich and raw songwriting soon evolves, with ghostly piano chords, into stark loneliness. By the end of Ruins’ 40 minutes, Grouper leaves its listeners aching for more of the album’s earthy echoes.

Liz Harris, the solo musician behind the moniker Grouper, composed Ruins during a 2011 residency in Aljezur, Portugal. She describes the album as a product of “political anger, emotional debris, and natural beauty.” Fitting, then, that Ruins ebbs with an intimacy that acoustically liberates such feelings of hers. Harris’ foot hovers on her piano’s sustain pedal as her emotions find shape in haunting lyrics: “I hear you calling and I want to come run straight into the valley of your arms and disappear.” But with this vulnerability comes a piercing sense of isolation. In just the second track, “Clearing,” Harris whispers, “It’s fading / Soon there won’t be anyone there.” Harris lays herself bare and invites her listeners to find refuge in her loneliness.

If the album provides shelter, then Ruins defies its name—rather than crumble, it constructs a space for both Harris and her listeners. With her meandering piano chords, Harris creates visions of the dilapidated beach village that inspired the album. Even the unedited background noise of insects and creaking furniture and, at one point, a microwave beep merge Grouper’s music with the environment from which it comes. Yet within this album’s distinct sense of space, Harris dissolves boundaries. She synthesizes unedited background sounds with pristine piano chords, blending her reminiscences with the listener’s present. In the echoing ethereality of Harris’ music, Ruins pours itself out to listeners with a vulnerability that begs listeners to pour themselves back.