Plants and Animals

Since 2005, Montreal’s Plants and Animals has been writing some of the most critically acclaimed music to have come out of that town in recent years. Its debut album, Parc Avenue, found the band exploring a vast array of sounds with a sense of playful abandon. It was a sprawling effort that established the group as one capable of writing pop songs without being stuck in a pop formula, whereas 2010’s La La Land revealed that the band had reined in some of the excesses of its earlier music but channeled that energy into more cohesive expressions of the darker end of youthful concerns. Its latest record, The End of That, is an exploration of late-twenties existential crises. This time the guys have honed their songwriting to a poetic clarity worthy of Robbie Robertson and David Bowie.