Darlingside - Blood Moon Dreams Darlingside

Darlingside's fifth LP, 'Blood Moon Dream,' almost never happened. After years of touring, recording, hard fought community building and life outside of music, the band was faced with existential questions of whether or not they would continue to exist. The resulting record feels human and honest, with intentionally sparse tracks reflective of the circumstances and reality that loomed over their creation. Rather than creating a record designed to appeal to tastemakers, algorithms and festivals, the band focused on creating music that meant something personal, letting the songs just be songs rather than a creation designed for any specific audience. The self-produced 2027 release is Darlingside distilled to its essence, which NPR once described as “exquisitely arranged, literary minded, baroque folk-pop.”

Comprised of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft, four likeminded multi-instrumentalists who first met at Williams College in 2009, Darlingside’s career has been defined by the elegance of their compositions and the unity of their four voices. Their talent for harmony and melodic world-building is part of what garnered praise from outlets like NPR, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and what has created demand worldwide for their extraordinary live performances. Becoming beautifully unindividualized has, in other words, worked very well for Darlingside in the past. With a vigor and discipline more common to graduate-level writing workshops than to indie rock, Darlingside has, over the years, experimented with all manners of idiosyncratic methods for elevating and upholding a truly democratic process of songwriting—processes that include multiple rounds of group writing and recording exercises—all with the aim of escaping the trap that bands with multiple songwriters often fall into: ego-driven infighting and artistic incoherence.