Many of us have been expecting Merchandise to come up with something great, but I’m not sure we expected After The End. The first listen through this thing is an overwhelming, leveling experience, the kind to leave you wondering aloud: Where did this come from? The “this” in question is the sharper, grander, more melodramatic sound Merchandise have adopted. I hesitate to say “overnight”; there are influences flowering here that had long been gestating back in all that messy distortion of their earlier work. But it does have the feeling of a shock to the system, an abrupt experimental turn for the band that, for them, takes the form of pop songcraft. And, damn, they’re good at pop songcraft — “Enemy” is the kind of song that immediately latches onto you and could define a month or two of your life, until you get around to “Green Lady” and that slowly dethrones it. These are songs that sound like they should’ve already been in your life — not because they sound too much like any other artist, but because they sound like long-lost classics. But After The End is also an album that demands to be listened to front to back, over and over, liberally coated in the sort of rich, decadent atmosphere you can get drunk off as a listener. The whole album has a humid grandeur that’s hard to pin down. It sounds rooted in the dense Floridian swamps where it was born, but also indebted to Britain; it sounds nothing like 2014, which makes it belong in the 21st century anyway. What it definitely does sound like is a wildly impressive work by a young band coming into their own, and one of the finest releases of the year. –Ryan [LISTEN]