For Robin Pecknold, the music of Fleet Foxes has been a coming-of-age story. Pecknold founded the band in Seattle with childhood friend Skyler Skjelset when they were just about 20 years old, making unpretentious yet studied folk music and quickly signing with Sub Pop, who released the band’s pair of landmark 2008 releases, Sun Giant EP and their self-titled debut. Fleet Foxes hid their youth in plain sight, singing fables and channeling musical influences—like Judee Sill and the Byrds—that signaled nous and maturity. By 2011, a 25-year-old Pecknold began to show his age with the existential Helplessness Blues before disappearing and returning, at 31, with the more confrontational Crack-Up. Over the course of just a few releases, you could trace the arc of a songwriter shedding his past, finding his voice, and making more personal, complex, and, often, brooding music.
Shore, the fourth album from Fleet Foxes, brings gratitude back into the fold as Pecknold ascends to a graceful new plateau. The record’s mood is born largely from existential worries and the shadow of death, common concerns of Pecknold, who, now 34, has spent his career transforming anxiety into euphoria with towering, wall-of-sound choruses that belie the unease that inspires them. Career-making songs like the barnstorming “Helplessness Blues” were strengthened by a sense of overcoming despair, the feeling that we could all stare down obsolescence and say, That’s OK, I’m OK. Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.
On Shore, being grateful also means staying true to yourself and expressing what comes naturally. The album is bright and open, recalling, at times, the sunniness of their early songs, as well as the lighter moments of 2017’s Crack-Up, like “Fool’s Errand.” Instead of turning away from major-key melodies and blissful vocal harmonies, Pecknold leans into musical happiness on songs like “Sunblind” and “Young Man’s Game,” among the most jubilant entries in the band’s catalog. On the latter, Pecknold acknowledges the futility of faking it, singing: “I could worry through each night/Find something unique to say/I could pass as erudite/But it’s a young man’s game.” Reinvention, he implies, is deceitful; refinement and reflection, instead, are the paths to progress.
The idea of refinement is crucial to Fleet Foxes because, on the surface, the band sounds remarkably similar to how it did 12 years ago—without feeling like it’s retreading past sounds or themes. The resurgent Crack-Up demonstrated Pecknold’s evolution as a lyricist and songwriter, someone who could write stirring couplets while commanding extended metaphors and maintaining a degree of writerly distance. The album also contained more intricate arrangements, something that Pecknold has carried onto Shore, where the compositions are even more textured and buoyant. The new album, which Pecknold performs almost entirely by himself, is lively, as if he has broken open previous albums’ ambitious centerpieces (namely “The Shrine / An Argument” and “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”) and spread bits of those proggy endeavors across the whole record. “A Long Way Past the Past,” for instance, layers horns and a shifting guitar line beneath Pecknold’s harmonies and words about letting go of regrets. The crisp production details give Shore a natural feel, as if the guitars, drums, and horns warble and float in the breeze alongside the birds, whose chirps lead “Maestranza.”