So often critics valorize the out–of–whole–cloth first record, the album that materializes from the ephemera to smother us with its majesty. But here, now, I’m digging what etches itself vastly more deeply after it first surfaces in our aesthetic mi(d)st.

For growth and development—that’s what takes my breath and reinspires me. Second and third albums that irrevocably change the ether, albums that remake what matters and thereby ascend to strata no one could have seen from down below when these artists swirled among us mortals. They blossom from their more modest debut buds, and colors and shapes and scents and all sense confront us and demand more from us—as fellow artists, as listeners. Nothing is the same after.

Progress from second to third is remarkable enough—sublime, evading understanding. Progress from first to second, though—“beyond sublime” is an oxymoronic claim, etymologically bankrupt, cognitively ludicrous…and fully fitting a stride this epochal.

How? Why? Where did they go, to grow? What hothouses of hearing and exploring could catalyze these explosions of fresh sounds? I want to deconstruct the complex reimaginings of song structures, to grasp the ways they grokked what might be and wrestled it into reality on record. I cannot.

So I finish where I began: The fantastic first is beautiful, but the staggering strut from first to second and second to third—that’s what I hold dearest today.

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