Listening to In Our Wake feels like sensing a distant weather front moving in. Nothing dramatic, just a slow shift in the air that quietly reshapes how everything around you feels. The album carries that same quiet heaviness, a kind of emotional overcast that hovers more than it declares, letting tension and warmth settle into the same breath.
That atmosphere comes naturally to Vancouver-based composer Taylor Swindells, the mind behind Neighborhood Libraries. Released on November 15, 2025 via Nettwerk, the record marks his third full-length album and comes after a stretch of writing for film and TV, alongside his other ambient and neoclassical projects. While Neighborhood Libraries’ earlier releases, Postcards for the Backyard (2023) and Departures (2024), carried a slightly more dynamic blend of neoclassical touches and softly shifting electronic textures, here he pares the palette down even further. The focus shifts toward drones, softened piano lines, and low-light synth movement, resulting in music that feels more pensive and delicately sculpted than before.
There’s a sense across the album that Swindells isn’t composing at the listener but observing something with them. Part of that comes from how he avoids the heavy-handed emotionalism that often appears in ambient and neoclassical work, choosing instead to let emotion surface through quiet suggestion. “I Choose the Astronaut” and “A Shaky Camera at the Edge of the World” drift between cold, distant tones and subtle warmth, like watching a faraway star through a telescope: the light is remote, yet the feeling of it is strangely intimate. “Phosphorescence” glows with a sense of wonder, echoing the slow-blooming expansiveness of Stars of the Lid. “Tunnels Under Our Feet,” meanwhile, recalls the introspective warmth of early Eluvium. Its soft piano and subdued synths give it a gentle, cinematic bittersweetness that lingers long after the track ends.
Fittingly, In Our Wake is described as inspired by “the mood and narrative flow of nature documentaries,” and you can hear it throughout—not in literal sound cues, but in the slow dissolves, the unhurried transitions, and the gentle sense of being guided without ever being told where to look.
That very aesthetic, however, comes with a trade-off. Several mid-album sections seem to hold their ground a little too firmly and settle into a textural stasis that risks feeling interchangeable. Some more nuanced twists and turns could have added a welcome contrast. Swindells has shown in previous releases that he can create such subtle arcs within very quiet music, and a touch more of that shaping could have enhanced the album’s intensity.
Still, the emotional honesty here is undeniable. In Our Wake feels like an album made not to impress, but to process something – to sit with uncertainty and see what surfaces. In a landscape of ambient music that often competes for scale and dramatic polish, Neighborhood Libraries offers a different kind of resonance: not impact, but perspective.
Check out the album here:
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music
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Find similar sounds in our recommended playlists:
Ambient & Neoclassical
Spacescapes [Cosmic Ambient, Drone]
Dreamy, Warm Drone-Ambient
We discovered this release via SubmitHub.
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