In the hazy terrarium of the pandemic–glass fogged over with trapped breath–it was hard to see what was to come next. It was a time of intense reflection, provoking a turn inward. Cincinnati-born quartet The Ophelias had just released 2021’sCrocus, which they couldn’t tour. Yet out of this time of obfuscation and derailment cameSpring Grove, the band’s fourth full-length album.Spring Grovebrims with startling reflections and the feelings of nostalgia that have become the band’s trademark–lyrical callbacks to old Cincinnati haunts, including the cemetery that gave rise to the album’s title–but there’s also a new, heightened sense of perspective. There are premonitions, omens, and prophetic dreams, as if looking at life from above. This stems, in part, from an OCD diagnosis that lead singer and songwriter Spencer Peppet received during the pandemic. “Dealing with medical stuff creates a hyper-awareness of the body,” she says,” a sense of removal where I can see myself from outside.” But the new perspective also stems from the deeper understanding that comes with growing up–the ability to see into the cracks and schisms that the youthful gaze might miss. The Ophelias have been a band since they were teenagers, butSpring Grove marks an evolution in their sound and storytelling as they take a keen eye to the knotty terrain of relationships and power dynamics,parsed through the complex machinations of the mind.

The band was sitting on a mountain of archival material in 2020–quarantined between their homes in Ohio, Maryland, and New York–when they got a fateful call: Julien Baker wanted to produce their next album. Baker had collaborated with The Ophelias before, singing harmonies onCrocus, but this was the first time the Grammy-winning songwriter was taking on the role of producer.After sending demos back and forth and ranking their favorites, Baker and the band–including violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes, bass player Jo Shaffer, and drummer Mic Adams, in addition to Peppet–spent ten days tracking at Young Avenue Sound in Memphis, TN, in 2021.

Whereas the orchestralCrocusfeatured many collaborators and friends, the idea withSpring Grove was to distill and pare the process down to the four members, in addition to Baker (who sings harmonies on a number of tracks) and engineer/mixer Calvin Lauber. The resulting sound is no less lush or huge. In fact,Spring Groveis the band’s most dynamic offering yet, confidently wielding the swagger of songs like “Salome” and “Sharpshooter” against the spectral strains of “Forcefed” and the shimmering outro of “Cicada,” which bleeds out into a voice memo of thousands of buzzing cicadas. These dynamics and imagistic touches create cinematic moments across the album, leading to a sound that the band refers to as “movie music,” inspired in part by Shaffer’s passion for making horror films. (Peppet and Shaffer–who are engaged–also co-direct all of the band’s music videos.) 

To create the bedrock of this visual language, and drawing inspiration from the production style of Rostam Batmanglij, Baker brought her pedalboard to the studio, dialing in Peppet’s guitar sounds to smear a wash of color across the songs. In place of lead guitar, Gutmann Fuentes’s violin became a colorful additional voice, with commanding countermelodies and call-and-response motifs that interweave with Peppet’s vocals. Shaffer, inspired by the attention to tone often found in doom metal, explored melodic lines higher up on the bass, sometimes playing multiple notes at once.

There’s a simultaneous intensity and delicacy to the way the dynamics are treated onSpring Grove, and a large part of that is due to Adams. This was Adams’s first album after transitioning and beginning to use he/him pronouns. Playing drums as a man for the first time meant a different approach to musicality. “In the studio,” Adams says, “they would say ‘play as loud as you can’—I don’t think anyone had ever said that to me in that way before. They were giving me permission.” But even though he no longer identifies as a woman, he continues, “I still feel like I play for that team. I represent women musicians. It’s the only time I’m comfortable being perceived as feminine.” You can hear this intricate push-and-pull in the rhythmic and textural variation of his playing–from the urgent breakbeat of “Say To You” and machine-like precision of “Salome,” to the ambling shuffle of “Parade” and tender ricochet of “Gardenia.” Adams credits Baker with creating a safe and supportive space for him as he explored these new shades of his identity and musicality.

Whilethe Ophelias began as an “all-girl” band, they have since shed the reductive mantle of that label.With one queer and two trans members (Shaffer is a trans woman), these four individuals have collectively explored a vast terrain of womanhood, dancing around the center of that identity and what it means to move through the world under–or out from under–its banner. To that end, the songs onSpring Groveare primed to tackle a wide array of relationship dynamics, emotional negotiations, and power imbalances. “Parade,” for instance, is a waltz throughthe complexities of deep female friendship, while teeth-gnashing “Salome” uses a Biblical story as a lens through which to view the experience of getting involved with an older man (“I want your head on a platter”). Lead single “Cumulonimbus”–one of the first songs written for the album–looks back at the dissolution of a relationship with compassion and regret. “The things that I didn’t say are always going to / Hang above you like a cumulonimbus,” Peppet sings, one of many instances where nature becomes a mirror for lived experience. Like the carrion-loving vultures depicted in the atmospheric, folktale-esque “Vulture Tree,” Peppet’s lyrics are an act of scavenging, picking at the viscera of the past as a means of ultimately feeding and healing herself. As she sings on “Forcefed,” “I’m eating my own organs and / I will let them sustain me.”

Having a body–being a body–is exhausting, especially when it’s bound by illness or fettered by the expectations of being a woman. WithSpring Grove,The Ophelias have createda transcendent collection that grapples with this reality and then circles it like a crow overhead, gaining new perspective in order to soar free. Across fourteen tracks that alternately rage and soothe, rich with the loam of past lives that germinates new growth, the album is ultimately a call for self-awareness and discovery, and the release that comes with stepping outside old patterns.

In the bookHow To Write An Autobiographical Novel,Alexander Chee writes of trying to know his future: “I wanted one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life.” Like Chee, Peppet is drawn to mirrors and reflections throughout these songs, both as a way of looking inward and as a way of seeing beyond, outside the boundaries of the body. By album’s end, though, she’s done trying to disentangle the past or decode the future. She’s come to terms with where she’s at, freeing herself from the distorted funhouse of her mind. On album closer “Shapes,” she vows to “try my best to let things pass just as it is.” What’s to come is not ominous or anguished or even all that unknowable. “I see what’s coming after,” she sings, clear-eyed, as the drums crescendo and crest, gradually receding into a placid froth of sound. It’s simply “a reflection in the water. / I am rippling forever.”