Some bands grab your attention, others quietly consume you. Grizzly Bear firmly fall in the latter category. Over the course of their decade-plus career, they have imbued guitar music with a weirdness and a worldliness few of their contemporaries could boast. As they return with their first album in five years, their dark wisdom has never felt so relevant.

Grizzly Bear were a band borne from natural circumstance. The name started life as a label for vocalist Ed Droste’s solo music in 2004. He was then joined by Chris Bear (drums) and Chris Taylor (bass and production), who offered their assistance reworking his recordings, after they were introduced through a mutual friend. Their first album, Horn of Plenty, was released, and not long after, Bear’s friend Daniel Rossen joined the set-up to provide guitars and vocals. From here the band proper was conceived. Yellow House, their first record as a quartet, came out in 2007. In 2009 they followed with their masterpiece, Veckatimest – securing their reputations as the giants of America’s then all powerful chamber-pop movement.

But by the time production and touring of their fourth album had come to an end, the Grizzly Bear project was exhausted. Shields (2012) was the result of a lengthy process, including an entirely abandoned near-album’s worth of material recorded in Marfa, Texas. “There was no clear future, that was definitely true,” Rossen makes clear to me, during one of four phone calls with the band’s respective members. “We were obviously very lost,” Taylor adds during another. An implied hiatus began. “I think we all sort of knew we needed a bit of space to address other elements of our lives,” Droste recalls.