CLEARED are Steven Hess & Michael Vallera. The Key was assembled and mixed by Vallera at home in the winter of 2019-2020. Chicago's pale, uncertain winter light, which renders objects with a kind of clarity, shorn of glamour or pretense, may have lent something to the album's aura of lucidity. Meditative and purposeful, Cleared display a preternatural ability to hover on a suspended moment, at the edge of what is yet to come - a liminal space between anxiety and calm