"It Floats" feels like a glass sphere drifting on dark water: luminous, fragile, deceptively simple, and hiding a whole meteorology inside. Mikoo, the Oslo-rooted ensemble orbiting drummer and composer Michaela Antalová, has always given the impression of a band thinking in multiple languages at once - rhythm, breath, texture, memory - but here they sound like they’ve agreed to speak in one shared dream. It’s their second album, built slowly over four years and across several cities, as if the music needed to accrue its own sediment before revealing its shape.

Antalová is at the center, not as a dictator of pulse but as a quiet engineer of gravity. Her drumming gives the music a sense of drifting momentum, like a tide deciding where it wants to break. Around her, the group folds itself with remarkable delicacy. Fredrik Rasten’s guitars shimmer like half-remembered folk songs turning toward abstraction. Vojtch Procházka’s organs and synths hum with a devotional patience, the kind that doesn’t require a church. Magnus Nergaard’s bass leans in and out of frame, more mood than anchor. And then there is Ina Sagstuen, whose voice carries the kind of emotional bandwidth that can make a line feel like an inheritance and a confession at the same time.

And inheritance is the album’s secret spine. Sagstuen’s lyrics rummage through everything passed down between generations: habits, myths, wounds that refuse to heal because no one dares to name them. There’s a feminist undercurrent that never shouts but slices cleanly, recalling how women have been written off as unstable, arcane, or dangerous - and how those old ghosts still pace the hallways of the present. The songs hover between vulnerability and resolve, like someone speaking quietly so you have to lean in.

The music mirrors this psychological archaeology. Some tracks clearly began as composed structures, while others feel like the moment a collective improvisation turns eerie and intentional, as if the band suddenly glimpsed the same image and followed it. This coexistence of meticulous craft and instinct gives the record its strange buoyancy. It really does float - not because it’s lightweight, but because it refuses to sink into a single genre. Indie pop dissolves into chamber minimalism, which mutates into something like folk stretched until it becomes vapor. Noise and rock haunt the edges, softening into colors rather than forms.

“Chased” unspools like a chase scene unfolding underwater, slow but relentless. “Three Scars” feels carved out of silence, each gesture carrying the weight of what is not said. “Everything Is Yelling Louder Than Me” is the closest the album comes to catharsis, though even here the eruption is subtle, like a whispered scream inside a cathedral. And “Bells”, barely two minutes long, closes the record with a small ritual, a soft ringing-out that feels like someone opening a window rather than shutting a door.

It helps that the album is wrapped in Dorothy Hood’s luminous artwork and shaped under the production guidance of Antalová and Kim Myhr, whose fingerprints you can sense in the balance between clarity and haze. The whole thing feels crafted with a patience almost unfashionable today: a willingness to wait for the music to reveal what it wants to become.

"It Floats" is an album about weight that refuses to be heavy, about history that still breathes down your neck, about emotional turbulence rendered with the precision of someone stitching a wound rather than pointing at it. It’s thoughtful, drifting, quietly radical. And somewhere in its currents, Mikoo seem to ask a question that lingers after the final notes fade: what parts of ourselves do we carry because they’re ours, and what parts because no one ever told us we could set them down?