Sam Chown records kaleidoscopic meta-pop as Shmu when he isn't making neo-prog as part of the duo Zorch or touring as the drummer for artists such as Vinyl Williams or Botany. He's been making music for almost his entire life, actually, and has recorded hundreds of albums' worth of material. Pure Bliss is his first full-length for French label Requiem Pour un Twister (also home to Vinyl Williams), and it's the album he's spent the longest time working on -- songs from this album date back to 2004, when Chown was still a teenager, and the bulk of it was written and recorded a decade later. Chown presented the demos to Lionel Williams (Vinyl Williams' namesake), and the two re-recorded the drums and completed the album. The songs themselves all come out of Chown's constant struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, and sleep disorders, and the various ways he's tried to cope with them over the years. Compared to his other albums, Pure Bliss, while still sprawling and multi-faceted, is certainly less scattered than his mind-blowing glitchgaze epic Shh!!!! (which is destined to be turned into a cult classic by a future generation, not unlike its closest cousin, Sweet Trip's masterpiece Velocity : Design : Comfort), and it doesn't quite delve into R&B and yacht rock influences the way his vaporwave-tinged follow-ups Lead Me to the Glow and Vish did. The music is generally a sort of drifting psychedelic art-pop, filled with lush self-harmonies and spiked with the shoegaze guitars more prevalent in Shmu's earlier work. Tracks like "Cursed Lips" and "Marble Falls" manage to blend jangle pop and prog-rock, while "Intertwining Sands" has a touch of post-punk bleakness to it. "Wolves of L.A." is at once downcast, sparkling, and trippy, resulting in the album's most memorable and impressive track. While not as unabashedly weird as Shmu's other albums, Pure Bliss is undoubtedly more personal, and feels like an essential distillation of Chown's emotional and musical evolution.