Infinite Glow is a new compilation from Brooklyn label Broken Circles with 100 percent of proceeds benefitting Planned Parenthood. It features 12 previously unreleased songs from label affiliates including Bandit, Talons’, Triathlon, and Ernie, each of them showcasing their quieter side. The label offered this statement along with the music:

Political music need not be explicitly political in order to make its statement. In fact, some of the most effective forms of protest have been quiet, subtle, secret.

We’ve never been the sort to sign outwardly political bands or wax militant one way or another beneath the label’s banner. Still, in this impassioned and problematic political era, we feel it necessary to take a side and have chosen to express it through a compilation featuring new and unreleased tracks, demos, etc, from almost our entire roster to benefit Planned Parenthood.

What’s so odd — and so Broken Circles — about this compilation is not the fact that these songs are not explicitly political, but that they are tranquil. It’s no surprise that Triathalon’s R&B-influenced track “U” is so smooth and spare, or that Talons’s “Dark Age” is so intimate and honest, stripped to bare strings and Michael Tolan’s humble tenor; it’s no surprise that Body Origami’s contribution “Prom Cream” is crisp in its dizziness, dark in its wintry waltz.

Instead, it’s that noisier bands on the roster have quieted down — like Lindsey Mills, whose contribution “Seams / I Saw U” is so delicate and distant and dark, compared to her typically plucky folk-pop. Or Hypoluxo, whose somber, snuffed track “Everything” is a far cry from their wavering indie pop. The compilation’s loudest tracks — by Counterfeit Jeans and Smut, both explosive bands in their own rights — still feel contained.

In one sense, Infinite Glow is political because of the cause that it supports, that access to safe health care need be a political topic is beside the point. But, in another sense, it protests by remaining quiet both in the political sense as well as the musical sense.

But the label need not stand on its soapbox to do its good, need not sloganeer. Instead, we’re satisfied speaking truth through means more quiet, subtle, secret.

Stream or purchase the full comp below.