Brooklyn songwriter Miguel Gallego's work as Miserable Chillers took many forms before arriving at the polished, sophisticated beauty of debut album Audience of Summer. Early lo-fi indie rock basement jams and experimental improvised material were connected by Gallego's exploratory creative nature, and that creative essence reaches its most refined form on these nine glistening productions. While he's joined by a host of friends on guest vocals, strings, and some lovely pedal steel guitar, the album is centered wholly around Gallego and built on a foundation of dream-like memories of his early life. A web of understated synths, programmed drums, and floating ambience makes up many of the instrumentals, and Gallego's aching vocals recall the bittersweet reflection of sophisti-pop bands like the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout. The experimental side that showed up unvarnished on earlier Miserable Chillers releases is more toned down here, but peeks through in the vocodered vocals and bustling synth arpeggios of "Card Captor" and the industrial field recordings of "City of Eyes." With this refined synthesis of pop accessibility and riskier experiments, Gallego walks listeners through a beautiful internal world. "The Glass" paints a picture of solitary childhood days spent walking through lonely suburban landscapes, and the playful shifting chords of "La Nave del Olvido" add to the friendly, impressionistic feel of lyrics about silently observing the scenes of a quiet neighborhood in the height of a slow-moving summer. Audience of Summer never goes over the top, reining in wobbly Eno-esque melodies on "Animal Trial" and Kate Bush-informed vocal samples on "Antipodes," each of which could easily be pushed to extremes. Instead, Gallego approaches every sound on the album with soft curiosity, arranging them slowly into a larger statement that communicates comfort, sadness, and sweetness with minimal but perfectly placed gestures.