Liz Harris released Way Their Crept in 2005 under the name Grouper, and for the first time in more than fifteen years, the debut album is being made available on LP and CD, reissued by Kranky in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the original release. The first in a series of ineffable solo albums and collaborations that have come since, these are the initial sounds widely shared by the artist on a long journey of explorations that continue to this day. What Way Their Crept established—and what Harris has spent two decades refining—is ambient music that refuses to function as background, music that drags you under rather than washing over, songs that feel distinct while remaining impossible to pin down. The New Yorker understood this immediately: "This is ambient music that refuses to simply wash over the listener; it's a riptide dragging you under."

The framework is carefully pared back—voice, guitar, piano, processing—but within that limitation Harris creates subtle tension and release that forms the emotional core of the album, as Crack Magazine noted. The songs exist in a strange temporal space, easy to feel but hard to remember, as if they're trying to wipe your mind clean and succeeding, The Washington Post observed. You can spend hours rolling the sound around inside your head, searching for secret ingredients that might not exist, trying to identify what makes Harris's approach distinct from the ambient music that preceded it or the countless imitators that followed. The answer might be in what she withholds rather than what she reveals, the way the chain reaction these songs generate produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong while keeping whatever secret she's trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers, as Pitchfork recognized.

Each track sounds, in the best possible way, like it was never meant to be heard outside the room in which it was recorded, The New York Times wrote, and that intimacy-as-distance creates the paradox at the heart of Harris's work. The music feels deeply personal yet fundamentally unknowable, present yet dissolving, clear yet obscured. The processing buries details while foregrounding texture, the voice emerges and submerges, the melodies suggest themselves without fully resolving. This isn't Brian Eno's ambient as furniture or Stars of the Lid's slow-motion orchestration—it's something more unsettling, less resolved, closer to Windy & Carl's guitar drift or Flying Saucer Attack's lo-fi haze but with a distinct approach to voice that makes it unmistakably Grouper.

Twenty years later, Way Their Crept still sounds like nothing else, or rather, it sounds like the template for a particular strain of ambient music that didn't quite exist before Harris created it. The reissue offers a chance to hear where it started, to understand the foundation before the expansions and variations that came after, to recognize that what seemed fully formed in 2005 was actually just the beginning of an ongoing investigation into how much you can obscure sound before it disappears entirely, and why that threshold matters. The album that established Grouper as essential returns, sounding as elusive and necessary as it did two decades ago.