One of the central implications of Christian faith and practice is that death doesn’t have the final word. In “The Eastern Gate,” a traditional Christian hymn, believers look forward to the joyful reunions that await them on the other side of the curtain— reunions with Christ, reunions with saints who’ve already crossed over into glory. An instrumental version of this hymn winds like a river through The Lone Bellow’s Half Moon Light, snippets of it appearing as a brief introduction, an album-bisecting interlude, and then as a quiet coda. It threads its way through songs about death, loss, and sorrow, bearing quiet witness; encircling these tenderhearted songs in otherworldly hope, watering them with God’s kindness. 

There is enough heaviness on Half Moon Light to fuel several forlorn singer-songwriter records, not to mention their accompanying press cycles. Two members of the core trio lost grandparents while this album was gestating, and one checked into substance abuse rehab. Oh, and have you turned on the news lately? It seems sometimes like nothing lasts forever, except “The Eastern Gate” wonders if maybe some things do. Perhaps its presence here is to bookend these temporal murmurs with glimpses at the eternal. It’s also worth noting that these instrumental snippets were played by singer/songwriter Zach Williams’ grandmother, at her own husband’s funeral. So maybe their inclusion here is to remind us that pain and loss are what thread us together as people, families, communities. We weather grief, we long for all manner of things to be made well, we do it together. May the circle be unbroken.

Befitting its somber subject matter, Half Moon Light is a quiet record, notably lighter on actual bellowing than any previous Lone Bellow release; Williams mostly sticks to a lower register of whispers and croons, a deep well of understated charisma. The Brooklyn group can still dole out cathedral-ceilinged eruptions of U2-style catharsis, as they do in the volcanic “Count On Me,” but much of Half Moon Light is twilit and slow-burning; there is something of a Cowboy Junkies/Trinity Sessions shimmer to it all, a similar midnight allure. The album was produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, whose work is textured but also warm, approachable, consoling. Many songs are built from acoustic guitars, pianos, and loops of wordless vocal harmony; some also have spritely horns and careening drums. The band members themselves (Williams, Kanene Pipkin, Brian Elmquist) soften their folksy austerity with soft-rock hooks and easeful melodies; imagine them as the small-batch, artisanal alternative to Little Big Town’s mainstream populism, both groups approaching acoustic roots music by way of Fleetwood Mac succor. Within the album’s after-hours glow, there exists a wide spectrum of moods: “Good Times” strikes up the horn section and leans into rowdiness, “Just Enough to Get By” is a salty blues. “Enemies” comes on soft as a whisper, and “Wonder” has the gentle sway of a campfire rag.

These songs investigate different ways of coping with grief, though they never wallow in it. Along with recent albums like Over the Rhine’s Love and Revelation and Elbow’s Giants of All Sizes, Half Moon Light is fundamentally concerned with processing, and it balances the heaviness of its witness-bearing against moments of light and grace. And so you have a song like “Count on Me,” where tribulation is the refiner’s fire (“let it break you/ let it help you lay down what you held on to”) and friendship is more valuable than silver and gold (“you can count on me if I can count on you”). And “Just Enough to Get By,” where Kanene Pipkin grits her teeth and voices feminine stoicism through mirthless jokes (“if silence is golden/ I know a lot of wealthy women”). You also have “Good Times,” which spins tall tales as a way to rhapsodize life lived in its fullness; it’s a song written for a season of mourning, reminding us that there’s also a season for revelry (“let no good time slip away”). Though the world of Half Moon Light is darkened by death and decay, rumors of glory are whispered along its periphery; in “Wonder,” Williams surrenders the hopelessness he’s harborded in his heart (“take the sorrow and the poison, I dreamt that I might need”). If despair is bondage, this song is a dream of freedom. The wispy, featherweight “Martingales” is even more direct in its prescriptive advice: “If yesterday’s too heavy, put it down.”

Half Moon Light is introspective, but that’s not to say that it’s insular. In “Illegal Immigrant,” which combines “Where the Streets Have No Name” atmospherics with dusty harmonica, Piper voices a mother’s quiet promise to find the child from whom she was taken; its a gentle witness to our evil days of border separations, and also to the more universal feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. But the record’s deepest well of compassion comes in “August,” a bleary-eyed gospel song written for the late Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit. He was a friend of the Lone Bellow crew, and the song wrestles to make sense of his shocking death: “Woke up and my mouth was dry/ Gotta get to the bottom of this.” It’s a song laid bare by grief, its only consolation the thin promise that “there is love all around you.” All that’s left after that is the sound of a piano playing an old Christian hymn; sorrow and hope, echoing through time.