The Antlers have grown up in their own way: slowly. The project’s first full-band effort, 2009’s Hospice, followed two collections of roughshod solo material from lead vocalist Peter Silberman, records that sounded as if he were fumbling in the dark; Hospice, then, was light making its way into the room, a collection of indie rock that drew from the sounds you’re likely to find on an iPod owned by someone in their mid-20s—sparkling chamber-pop, angsty, emotive vocal surges, gaping shoegaze guitars. Two years later, they returned with Burst Apart, a transitional effort that found the Antlers getting weirder, incorporating the kind of saucer-eyed ambience familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Sigur Rós in a smoke-filled dorm room.

If Burst Apart was the sound of the Antlers dipping their toes into unfamiliar waters, on the following year’s mini-LP Undersea they took the plunge: notions of immediacy and concision were discarded, replaced by a slow-handed approach to space rock that valued detail over the type of explicit melodicism showcased in their earlier work. In opposition to the music that was being put forth, the shift on Undersea was startling, bold, and more than a little brave. By industry standards, the Antlers were growing—Undersea was their first release for Anti-, a significant step up in visibility from their previous label, NYC-based farm-team indie Frenchkiss—but as the lights were increasingly trained on them, the band managed to find their own darkened corner in the musical landscape. Hospice could sound like the work of a band that was very good at sounding like other bands; Undersea was the point at which the Antlers found themselves. Familiars, the Antlers’ first full-length in three years, confirms that they are operating in their own zone. They’ve doubled down on Undersea’s somnambulant moodiness and increased focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release.

As with every Antlers record since Hospice, Familiars was self-produced, and the group’s collective ear for texture continues to take hold as its own expressive instrument. As ever, drama is in no short supply either. Silberman’s lyrical predilections, in particular, have long possessed an emotional scope that speaks to the honest naiveté associated with stumbling through your young adulthood: Hospice essentially compared love and loss to a children’s cancer ward, Burst Apart was all house fires and metaphors for sexual frustration, and Undersea explored the age-old concept of water-as-emotional metaphor. In an interview with Pitchfork, Silberman name-checked filmmaker Gaspar Nóe’s trippy opus Enter the Void, a movie that treats death as an orgasmic act of self-exploration, as one of a few inspirations for Familiars’ funeral-pyre slow-burn. “There are different ways to look at death,” he said, “and they don’t have to be depressing at all.”

In that same interview, Silberman claimed that the Antlers are frequently pegged as a “sad band,” and while no one will mistake the breathy ruminations of Familiars as “happy music,” the record’s instrumentation has a transcendent brightness, not unlike what you might see when closing your eyes after staring into the sun for too long. The spacious lope of “Intruders” is made up of muted guitar stabs and molasses-slow drum work, surrounded by heavy swirls of space and dotted with the occasional horn and keyboard flourish; “Surrender” rests itself on a gently descending guitar figure that, at the six-minute song’s midpoint, reaches upwards to impossible heights before dissolving in pedal-abused piano and horns soaked in warmth.

Whether they’re reaching above their heads or to the deepest depths, on Familiars the Antlers are even more concerned with catharsis, resulting in a string of patient, beatific crescendos. (The word “patient” is, at this stage of the Antlers’ career, operative: only two of Familiars’ 10 songs finish before reaching the five-minute mark.) The elegiac “Director” spends its first two minutes and change moving at the pace of a burning stick of incense, as Michael Lerner’s brushed cymbals create a suitable bed for drowsy guitar; then, the weight shifts in the form of rolling drums and just enough six-string fuzz, evoking the type of soft psychedelia that Spiritualized have occasionally turned to. Opener “Palace” is essentially five-and-a-half minutes of declarative melody that comes on strong and stays there before vanishing completely, while “Revisited” is the record’s torch song—but one without resolution, as Silberman repeatedly switches between anguished vocals and receding into the background, breaking into a elliptical guitar solo near the song’s end that floats above the fizzy electronics.

As a vocalist, Silberman’s never shied away from theatricality; on Hospice’s “Sylvia”, he seethed and cried to match that song’s bursting guitar burn of a chorus, and every successive release has seen him expanding his register to match the music’s at-times skyscraping qualities. On Familiars, Silberman cements himself as one of indie rock’s most compelling and distinctive singers. He’s capable of projecting a wide, complex range of emotions—angry and defeated on “Hotel”, cautiously hopeful on “Intruders”. On the straightforward saunter of “Parade”, he takes on the ruminative prognostication of someone looking at a yearbook and wondering if the future and past possess any connection at all.

Lyrically, Silberman’s very much in his therapist’s-couch lane on Familiars, with a few subtle shifts in his mindset that you’d expect anyone currently reaching the end of their late 20s to undergo. “Maybe when I’m older,” he optimistically states in the beginning of “Intruders”, “I’ll be clearer/ More attuned and understanding.” On “Refuge”, he morbidly turns his gaze to what life’s endgame means—”When you lift me out of me/ Will I know when I’ve changed?”—but despite that and other brief meditations on death-as-release, Familiars’ thematic focus is a bit more scattered than Silberman name-checking The Tibetan Book of the Dead would have you believe. This time around, the theme he returns to most is identity—who we see when we look in the mirror, what happens when we don’t recognize who’s staring back—and on “Intruders”’ emotional peak, he confronts the terrifying possibility of encountering a dopplegänger with what sounds like murderous intentions: “When my double scales the wall/ I’ll know exactly where he’s landing/ And I’ll surprise him.”

Indeed, even as Silberman’s stuck with his most literary affectations—full-sentence lyrical statements, a heavy reliance on symbolism—he and the Antlers have loosened in terms of pretense over the last five years, taking on more self-absorbed concerns as their music has grown more insular and drowsy. The 28-year-old Silberman was barely of drinking age when he released music under the Antlers guise in earnest, and in the eight years since he and his band have aged publicly, charting their own distinct course while making music about the small-scale challenges faced when you feel truly lost in the world. Against all odds, they’ve become one of the most interesting indie rock bands working, and the stately beauty of Familiars is the latest satisfying effort from a band that continues to reward those listeners who give them the attention their elegant, secretly weird music deserves.