"Even more than its predecessors, the band's impassioned ninth album, The Thread That Keeps Us, is dedicated to immigrant experiences and the pains of displacement. As always, Calexico are more interested in storytelling than grandstanding, but it's hard to miss the role that border politics and environmental disasters play in the band's latest batch of character sketches and vignettes. This is an album that pointedly humanizes the disenfranchised people whose voices are too often shut out of policy debates".