For the last five years, Joe Westerlund’s music has explored and documented his personal unknowns. Before the 2020 release of his solo debut, Reveries in the Rift, Westerlund was largely a band guy, whether that meant charting the edges of folk-rock with his childhood friends in DeYarmond Edison and, later, Megafaun, or offering the anchor to acts like Watchhouse and The Dead Tongues. But on Reveries, he wondered what it would be like to make meditative percussive music, to wander into the middle distance of his own introspection with his drum kit. Some of those findings reappeared on 2023’s lauded Elegies for the Drift, where he stared into several painful ends—of a 20-year partnership and the death of multiple friends, collaborators, and mentors—and tried to send those relationships off with sound. These were largely open-ended and improvisational albums, Westerlund paying less attention to sheer rhythmic patterns than emotional frameworks.

Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by Curiosities from the Shift, by its insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long in the trenches of bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter, at least for a while. But music is, of course, rarely a binary, where one element obviates all room for the other. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to, once again, render another of his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, Curiosities from the Shift is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.