Crack-Up  by Fleet Foxes

After the success of 2011's Helplessness Blues, central creator Robin Pecknold withdrew from the spotlight, studied at Columbia University, and found new inspiration through surfing and isolation. This period of "breaking away" from the past gave birth to an album that refuses the ease of past folk melodies. Crack-Up was released in June 2017.

The creation of the album was a journey through iconic studios in the U.S., from Electric Lady Studios in New York to Avast Recording in Seattle. The recording (2016-2017) served as a band reconnection process after a long pause. Pecknold used Crack-Up (a title inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay of the same name) to explore his personal fragile balance. The result is an album that resembles a collage of sounds, incorporating everything from samples of lawyers’ voices to the sound of waves. Musically, the album is characterized as progressive folk. It is dense, labyrinthine, and cinematic, with tracks flowing into one another. The familiar celestial harmonies remain, but now they are framed by complex orchestrations with cello, harp, and unexpected rhythm changes.

Crack-Up is an album that demands your undivided attention, rewarding you with a depth rarely encountered in the modern indie scene. It reached No.9 in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom.