Days by Real Estate

Days, Real Estate's second album, came out on Domino on October 18, 2011, and it was made far from the city: the Ridgewood, New Jersey band spent five months holed up in a remote barn in New Paltz, New York, with Kevin McMahon producing. Only "Out of Tune" came from somewhere else, taped by Jarvis Taveniere at Rear House in Brooklyn, and Greg Calbi mastered the lot at Sterling Sound.

Martin Courtney, Alex Bleeker and Matthew Mondanile, childhood friends from Ridgewood, weave clean, chiming guitar lines around each other while Jackson Pollis keeps the drums at a stroll. It's suburban indie rock with the sun going down, and the sleeve says so outright: a 1966 photograph of tract houses in Bayonne, New Jersey, from Dan Graham's Homes for America. Tom Scharpling directed the video for "Easy", which ran on Funny or Die, and Pitchfork stamped the record Best New Music. Atlas followed.

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