However, despite their stylistic similarities, I value them for entirely separate reasons.

At first, I devalued Shrines marginally because of how closely it resembles many contemporary "weird pop" artists. But with time, this supposed unoriginality showed a braver side of the band, acting as some sort of camouflage. The individual tracks are so consistently strong that their quality alone becomes Shrines' "calling card" rather than some stylistic signpost. It doesn't just sound like a strong debut, but the magnum opus that alludes so many of their contemporaries (i.e it leaves no reason for the likes of Polica or Glasser to continue...)

By contrast, Visions has a much more scattered quality, perhaps deliberately so. The highlights, such as Circumambient, are largely agreed upon, but that just leaves people to squabble over where the record falls down... But, at the risk of taking Boucher's isolation backstory too seriously, there are points where I feel she has achieved infusing a good album of contemporary pop with a strong sense of feeling, perfectly embodied by Skin is, My. Perhaps I'm being pretentious, but it just appears much more personally affected than any other LP this year, even from more typical genres.

Bit of a rambling OP, but I thought these two albums deserved discussion now we have some hindsight. Or perhaps people have similar feelings for two other albums.