Crack-Up is the third album by Fleet Foxes.

Released on June 16, 2017 as the follow-up to their 2011 album Helplessness Blues, Crack-Up is the band’s first release on Nonesuch Records. It is also their first release in six years, following a three-year hiatus from 2013 to 2016.

The title is inspired by a few things: an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name, the arrangement and editing approach, and the initials of Pecknold’s alma mater, Columbia University.

Pecknold told Pitchfork:

The first resonance was feeling like I’d cracked myself to some extent. I read the essay at a time when I wasn’t really sure what I cared about exactly, which is something Fitzgerald addresses a bit. I wasn’t focusing on music, I was trying to find other hobbies but nothing else had quite the same pull.

Beyond that, there are themes in the essay that come up a lot on the album, both lyrically and musically. The essay addresses the necessity of holding two opposing thoughts in one’s mind at once, in the “I can’t go on/I must go on” sense. I’ve struggled at times with finding a solid, objective reason to live, or I should say I’ve struggled with the notion of needing an airtight reason—almost anything you cling to can be explained away with logic in one way or another if you’re crafty enough. So that has meant coming around to making my own meaning, and finding meaning in connection to other people.

Lyrically, a lot of the album deals with perception, and the difference between how I have seen the world and how it actually is, in terms of people or situations or self-assessment, or any other permutation of the problem. As I get older I try and take people as they are and project less onto them, either good or bad, not make damsels or heroes or villains out of people who are just individuals doing their best with the hand they’ve been dealt.

As far as how the title relates to the structure of the album, the editing and arrangement, there are a number of songs where I wanted the transitions to feel jarring, non-linear, like you were watching a movie that has been edited partially out of sequence, like a Nicolas Roeg movie, or as if it’s a stained glass window that’s been shattered and reassembled.