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North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Andrew Marlin and multi-instrumentalist Emily Frantz, aka Mandolin Orange, release Tides Of A Teardrop, their first new music since 2016. It finds Mandolin Orange exploring the intimate grief at the frayed edges of their songwriting and confronting loss head-on, facing down the depths of despair and emerging with something renewed and redemptive. It's a progressive, personal statement from one of roots music's most thoughtful young groups, on the cusp of yet another prodigious breakthrough.

On the self-produced set, their slow-burning acoustic meditations on love and loss are belied by a newfound directness as Marlin tackles the death of his mother, who died when he was 18. "I think her passing was almost the genesis of my writing," says Marlin. "That was when I really began to find refuge in writing songs." Marlin's songwriting voice emerges clearer than ever throughout, set in sharp relief by the indelible performances of Mandolin Orange's longtime touring band: Josh Oliver on keyboards and guitar, Clint Mullican on bass, and Joe Westerlund on drums. Whether it's the trilling, weighty atmosphere of the allegorical "Wolves" or the Appalachian yearning of the hymn-like "Suspended In Heaven," Marlin and Frantz's vocal and instrumental interplay is as dialed in as ever, the instinctual expression of deeply known but unspoken truths.