There’s no other band with a sound quite like Darlingside’s. Across the Massachusetts indie folk group’s nearly two decades together, their music has burst at the seams with layered, intricate vocal harmonies, surprising rhythms, thoughtful lyrics, and enduring melodies. Each band member juggles multiple instruments on stage, and their voices can alternately merge into one sound or pull apart and recombine like a murmuration of birds. They have released five acclaimed albums, toured internationally, and attracted the attention of the New Yorker, NPR, Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Paste, the Huffington Post, American Songwriter, No Depression, and a devoted following of careful listeners along the way. 

Their new album, Blood Moon Dreams, finds the trio — vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, and Harris Paseltiner — addressing a turning point in their career by making a conscious shift away from the expansive textures, universal anthems, and abstract ideas that had characterized recent albums. Re-examining their priorities in the wake of an unstable period for the band, they decided to resist their tendency to embrace lush studio production and focus instead on the bare-bones fundamentals of songwriting, arrangement, and simply playing in a shared space together. That decision has yielded a quiet, contemplative, and entrancing album that is also the most honest and personal they’ve made to date.

The minimalist arrangements on Blood Moon Dreams still dazzle and captivate: while banjo, guitar, and mandolin variously interweave around the voices in the foreground, strings, pump organs, synthesizers, pianos, and even a bowed saw quietly glow around the edges of these songs. The additions are subtle though, and the band took pains to resist the temptation to add too much. “It felt oddly revolutionary to approach this with an attitude of ‘how little can we do?” says Mitchell. “In a weird way, it almost felt like the only experiment left for us to try was to just take the thing that comes naturally and only do that.”