Josh Evert has spent more than a decade quietly shaping the sound of Milwaukee’s indie underground. From his run as the frontman of The Fatty Acids to his work in Dinner Set Gang and most recently the dream-leaning project Known Moons, Evert has built a reputation as one of the city’s most restless and resourceful songwriters. With his latest release, “Photogenic Memory,” he steps off the band-leader pedestal and into something a little more cinematic.

Billed as a soundtrack, “Photogenic Memory” trades verse-chorus-verse for mood, texture, and slow-burning atmosphere. It is the kind of record that does not so much demand your attention as it gently leans on it, layering warm synth pads, gauzy guitar drones, and patient melodic motifs that feel like they were pulled from the margins of an old home movie. There is a real sense of place to the whole thing, even when the music drifts into the abstract — call it Midwestern ambient with a heart still beating somewhere under the reverb.

What makes the record land is the same instinct Evert has been sharpening since the Fatty Acids days: a knack for finding the emotional hook inside something that, on paper, should sound like background music. Themes loop back on themselves, get inverted, get rewritten in a different key three tracks later, and by the end you are convinced you have been watching a film that does not actually exist. Which, frankly, is the highest compliment you can pay a soundtrack album.

Stream “Photogenic Memory” in full below and dig into one of the more quietly ambitious releases to come out of Milwaukee this year.