Music to Forget Yourself With

In 2013, the Pennsylvania-born songwriter Steve Gunn released “Time Off,” his fifth solo record. Two months earlier, Kurt Vile, a contemporary of Gunn’s, put out “Wakin on a Pretty Daze,” a collection of slack, unspooling guitar songs. A barely legible blip on the cultural radar, maybe, but here were two new records, both beautiful, that embodied a not quite indifferent but assuredly unbothered ethos: “Chill out.” It’s a point of view that was pervasive throughout the nineteen-nineties—a decade in which studied disaffection was its own creative engine—but is mostly absent now, when emotional resonance is at the forefront of everything.