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.

A turbulent few years had led to a sense of confusion among the band members about what — if any — their next moves should be. When longtime core member Dave Senft stepped back from the band in 2023 to be able to spend more time with his young family, the remaining members initially reacted to his absence by adding things: they pulled several new musicians into their touring party and released Everything Is Alive, an album that made ample use of the menagerie of new live sounds available to them. At the conclusion of the ensuing tour, though, a shared feeling of overextension and exhaustion — all combined with the new responsibilities and growing families that attend life in middle-age — led the band to agree to an indefinite hiatus that would allow each of them time to reflect, both on what felt important to them in this unexpected moment of inflection and what that all might mean for Darlingside going forward.

After reconnecting six months later, all three musicians agreed they wanted the band to continue, but that an “intentional artistic reset” would be required. Turning away from the idea of the fuller band, they embraced a less-is-more approach. “We realized that what we all really cared about the most was getting to play music with each other,” says Mukharji. “And once we understood that that was the priority, we reoriented everything else to focus on doing that in a way that felt healthy and sustainable.”

On previous projects, the band tended to write and record simultaneously, spending long and intensive months in the studio crafting each song layer by layer with painstaking precision. For this album, however, they placed a novel set of restrictions on their process that would help capture the new songs quickly and organically. They set up at Ghost Hit Recording, a studio built into a “very possibly haunted” New England church nestled between an old witch path and a graveyard, and briskly tracked one song per day. They recorded their vocals live, preserving the natural echo and instrumental bleed of the church sanctuary. “We felt that a loosening of the grip would be helpful,” says Mitchell. “And we wanted to approach this album in a way that would allow some slight imperfections and raw edges to come through. We didn’t want to get hung up on anything, and we wanted to make sure everything kept flowing.”