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**There's A Riot Going On**
★★★★☆

After three decades of indie rock alchemy, Yo La Tengo could have easily coasted into their golden years, content to play the elder statesmen card and phone in another collection of pleasantly rambling guitar pop. Instead, Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew decided to torch their own playbook with *There's A Riot Going On*, their most adventurous and polarizing statement since the noise-drenched epics of *I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One*.

The Hoboken trio's fifteenth studio album arrives at a peculiar cultural moment – recorded during the early days of Trump's presidency and released into a world seemingly teetering on the edge of chaos. But rather than respond with fury or protest anthems, Yo La Tengo has crafted something far more unsettling: a fever dream of fractured electronics, ambient drift, and songs that seem to dissolve before your ears. It's as if they've soundtracked the sensation of scrolling through social media at 3 AM, watching civilization unravel in real time.

The album's title, borrowed from Sly & the Family Stone's masterpiece, proves prophetic. Like Sly's 1971 opus, this *Riot* finds its creators retreating inward, processing external turmoil through internal exploration. But where Sly channeled his disillusionment into funk grooves, Yo La Tengo splinters their sound into a kaleidoscope of textures that rarely coalesce into traditional song structures.

Opening track "You Are Here" sets the tone with its queasy blend of drum machines, processed vocals, and guitars that sound like they're transmitting from another dimension. It's immediately recognizable as Yo La Tengo – Hubley's distinctive drumming anchors the chaos while Kaplan's guitar work retains its melodic DNA – yet utterly alien from anything in their catalog. The effect is disorienting in the best possible way, like hearing your favorite band through a broken radio in a fever dream.

The album's most successful moments occur when this experimental impulse serves the songs rather than overwhelming them. "Shades of Blue" builds from ambient beginnings into something approaching a conventional rocker, complete with one of Kaplan's most memorable guitar hooks in years. Meanwhile, "Dream Dream Away" finds the band channeling their inner Krautrock obsessions, with McNew's bass providing hypnotic foundation for layers of treated guitars and electronics that gradually accumulate into something genuinely transcendent.

But *There's A Riot Going On* demands patience in ways that might frustrate casual listeners. "Out of the Pool" meanders through seven minutes of ambient noodling that feels more like a studio experiment than a finished composition, while "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House" tests even devoted fans' tolerance for self-indulgence. These aren't necessarily failures – they're part of the album's larger commitment to following ideas wherever they lead, commercial considerations be damned.

The record's most striking achievement might be how it captures the specific anxiety of our historical moment without ever becoming explicitly political. Tracks like "Polynesia" and "Here You Are" evoke the sensation of information overload, of trying to process too much stimulus simultaneously. The band's use of electronics – never their strong suit in previous decades – finally feels integrated rather than ornamental, creating soundscapes that mirror our digitally fractured attention spans.

Georgia Hubley's vocals, always the band's secret weapon, prove particularly effective in this context. Her delivery on "For You Too" conveys vulnerability and strength in equal measure, while her harmonies throughout the album provide human warmth amidst the electronic abstractions. It's a reminder that even at their most experimental, Yo La Tengo remains fundamentally a band about connection and empathy.

*There's A Riot Going On* won't convert skeptics or serve as anyone's introduction to Yo La Tengo's catalog. It's too willfully difficult, too committed to process over product. But for listeners willing to meet the band on their terms, it offers rewards that their more accessible albums can't match. In an era of playlist culture and shortened attention spans, Yo La Tengo has created an album that demands to be experienced as a complete statement – a 70-minute journey through the psychic landscape of contemporary America that feels both deeply personal and unnervingly universal.

Whether this represents the future direction for one of indie rock's most enduring bands remains unclear. But as a