Silver Rider

Low’s entire career is weather music, but “Silver Rider” is the distillation — six minutes of a two-chord guitar figure, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker harmonizing in their specific married-for-decades way, and a slowly accumulating backdrop of distortion that eventually consumes the arrangement.

The song doesn’t build toward anything in the traditional sense. It gathers. The guitars get denser. The harmonies hold. By the end the song is a wall of sound that started somewhere very quiet, and the transition from A to B feels less like a musical decision and more like a barometric reading you are only now noticing. Six minutes of front.