Throughout “Marigold,” the new album by the ordinarily openhearted and unguarded New Jersey folk-emo band Pinegrove, the frontman Evan Stephens Hall presents himself as stuck in mud. “I wake up and feel totally the same/I woke up the same as yesterday,” he sings on “Endless.” On “Phase,” the “Groundhog Day” mood is similarly overcast: “Nowadays I usually just get up/put on a sweater from the day before.”

For a singer known for being appealingly bare, the shift to a resigned tone is striking. Pinegrove’s first three albums — which nestled vivid emo confessionals in soothing roots arrangements — were impressive and sometimes stellar models of communion. They felt like invitations to feel.

So it’s hard not to register lyrics like these as a reflection of the darkness that’s loomed over the band for the last two years. In late 2017, Hall posted on Facebook that he’d been accused of “sexual coercion,” while offering few details. What’s followed has been purgatory in two stages: First, the band shelved its third album, “Skylight,” and went silent for a year, reportedly at the request of the accuser; in late 2018, the group released that album and began sporadically touring and giving interviews.

Pinegrove is fully back now. “Marigold,” the band’s sometimes wounded, sometimes scabbed fourth album, can’t help but feel like the record of that interregnum, even if Hall prefers not to see it that way. “I want to resist an autobiographical interpretation,” he said in an interview with Apple Music about the new album. “I want people to see themselves in this record.”