Darlingside

Listen to Darlingside

Across the indie folk group’s nearly two decades together, Darlingside’s music has burst at the seams with layered, intricate vocal harmonies, surprising rhythms, thoughtful lyrics, and enduring melodies. Each band member juggles multiple instruments, and their voices can alternately merge into one sound or pull apart and recombine like a murmuration of birds.

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 shifting away from lush studio production and focusing 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 interweave around the voices in the foreground, strings, pump organs, synthesizers, pianos, and even a bowed saw quietly glow around the edges of songs that explore the frictions and exhaustion of middle age, while also considering the peace that can come from accepting those things. In a world that can feel increasingly flooded with artifice and noise, Blood Moon Dreams offers an alternative: music that is bracingly human, alive, and real.