See You Tomorrow, the twelfth album from The Innocence Mission, opens with a song called “The Brothers Williams Said,” which captures one of the ultimate introvert dilemas: When your nature is to be shy and reserved, how do you convey your love and affection to the people around you? The song’s protagonist moves quietly through life offering small gestures of warmth and charity; a smile on the streets, a friendly wave to passersby. Such grace notes are lost on the fellows who give the song its title (“The Brothers Williams said/ you don’t ever talk”), but they are not lost on the narrator, who speaks words of encouragement and gratitude: “The kindness of your face/ does not go unrecognized/ has not refused to shine/ in this most difficult time.”

This is about as Innocence Mission-y as a song can get. They have arguably never written anything more on-brand, except perhaps for deep cut “When Mac Was Swimming,” about a little boy lost at play, unaware of the loved ones scurrying about to make his birthday celebration special. Songs like these speak to what makes The Innocence Mission one of the most irreplaceable of bands: There are few songwriters who would be as sensitive in capturing the shy person’s plight. And there are none who have amassed such a treasure trove of songs that find holy wonder and simple beauty in everyday acts of connection. If The Innocence Mission was special for no other reason, they would be special for their recurring subject matter: Kindness. Humility. Mercy. Compassion. Our shared need to be seen. To show others that we see them.

There is a reasonable criticism to be made that the band returns to the same well over and over, not just in content but in sound. It’s true that their albums since We Walked in Song have all felt of a piece. They are all lovingly crafted basement recordings made by the Peris family— Karen and Don, occasionally joined by their string-playing children or bassist pal Mike Bitts. Karen fills each album with delicate singing and carefully-stanzaed lyrics that draw deeply from poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Don provides the gentle rustle of acoustic guitar strings, as clarion as cathedral bells, and the occasional smudge of shoegaze atmospherics. These recordings are simple but sound lush; you can often hear the crack and hiss of the tape rolling, romantic swells of pump organ, accordion, and creaking piano. They are quiet, too, except when they are loud: When a drum kit enters toward the end of “We Don’t Know How to Say Why,” a highlight of the new album, it sounds like thunder. See You Tomorrow is enchanting for all of the same reasons that Sun on the Square was enchanting, but there’s a difference between a band that’s directionless and a band that’s faithful to a very particular muse. The Perises stand alone in their attentiveness to this niche of beauty, this reservoir of quiet, this oasis of kindness and vulnerability.

Their masterpiece of storytelling remains Birds of My Neighborhood, which aches with lamentation and hope during a difficult season. But since then, Karen’s writing has become even more impressively succinct and incisive. On song after song she imbues the mundane with meaning, and a lot of See You Tomorrow is spent gently kneading the wordless and ineffable into beautiful, precise language. Listen to the sensitivity with which she sketches a character in “We Don’t Know How to Say Why,” who only wants “to be loved as much as anyone,” then bursts into tears from an undefinable longing. “At Lake Maureen” uses an afternoon hiking and sailing to meditate on the mysteries of time’s passage (“I feel something new about you/ every day of the world”). In “St. Francis and the Future,” the narrator wants only to stay where she is with her loved ones, and to keep change and uncertainty as far-off as possible (“Oh, make the future small”). And who can’t relate to the voice at the center of “The Brothers Williams Said,” who wishes she could “love the mystery/ and have no tears that there can be no better understanding.” These songs live in the peculiar glow of all the things we can never fully understand or articulate, but are caught up in nevertheless; what Joe Henry calls the “bigger things unseen.”

At first blush, the albums of The Innocence Mission can sometimes sound like they belong to another world entirely, one where beauty is savored and where people are more decent. But there is no Thomas Kinkade-style idyll, no denial of this world’s hardship. You certainly hear it in Birds of My Neighborhood, an album that attests to disappointment, barrenness, and sorrow. As for See You Tomorrow, perhaps it’s a noteworthy coincidence that the album was released around the same time as the Drive-by Truckers record The Unraveling, which chronicles contemporary malaise with diaristic precision (song titles include “Babies in Cages” and “21st Century USA”) and basically amounts to a nihilistic howl. It’s a lament from a slipstream far beyond our control; See You Tomorrow, with its songs about time and uncertainty and fickle emotion, is not entirely dissimilar. But into the wild and the uncontainable, the Peris family offers a tender gift of grace, peace, and kindness; proof that these, too, are among the bigger things unseen.

Every album by The Innocence Mission is filled with characters who channel the mundane into the momentous; characters who turn the tide and save the day through simple acts of kindness.

There’s “When Mac Was Swimming,” in which a little boy enjoys a day at the pool, blissfully unaware of loved ones scurrying around town, making plans and preparations for his birthday party. (“You’ll never know, darling/ You’ll never know how you are loved,” is the song’s simple and seismic conclusion.)

There’s the friend in “July,” showing up with sparklers in her hands at the end of an arduous day; she delivers light and joy, and has no idea how badly both are needed.

There’s even Fred Rogers, iconic for his empathy and compassion, invoked as both patron saint and kindred spirit on an album called Hello I Feel the Same. In the song, our narrator dreams that she can drive for miles just to see him; for him to smile at her, and tell her how she “could make things better.”

Such humility is befitting for this, the gentlest and most tender-hearted of bands—though they may be selling themselves short. For years they have been making things better for their small yet fervent following. Like the girl in “July,” they always seem to arrive with a gesture of kindness and encouragement just when such things are in shortest supply; and it is possible that they, too, have no idea how badly their joyful witness is needed.

Their elegant new album Sun on the Square is the latest in a long line of records that feel like refuges and oases—records that favor serenity over agitation, sincerity over irony, modesty over ostentation. These albums celebrate friendship, domesticity, and God’s grace—always seen through the prism of the tiniest gestures of love and charity. One of the new song titles, “An Idea of Canoeing”—like “When Mac Was Swimming” before it—conveys something of their flair for turning idle afternoons into mile-markers; this is a band unparalleled at documenting the little moments of grace revealed by hindsight to be formative.

There was a time when The Innocence Mission followed their instincts pop-ward, even feinting toward mainstream success on bubbly, up-tempo albums like Glow. They’ve pared down from a working four-piece to a central husband-wife alchemy—Don and Karen Peris, often but not always joined by longtime collaborator Mike Bitts on upright bass, and now by their string-playing children on select songs—and since 2007’s We Walked in Song they’ve quietly released a series of albums that feel of a piece: modest bedroom recordings that champion simplicity, savoring the warm thrum of acoustic guitar strings; the diaphanous tremor in Karen’s voice; songs that move at an unhurried, autumnal pace; words that glisten with elegance and precision. Sun on the Square both continues and subtly progresses that series, offering another collection of unassuming songs that find new wrinkles within a signature sound.

It’s their most distinguished album since 2003’s Befriended, largely because it’s their most sonically adventurous and casually exploratory. The Perises still write quiet folk songs, but here there’s pure sound bleeding through the edges, making even some of the slowest and softest numbers sound humming and atmospheric. Don’s acoustic guitar remains at the forefront—and his gossamer notes still ring like church bells—but many songs are given a summery ambiance by Karen’s pump and field organs, which hang a kind of hazy mystique over the proceedings, as if suggesting a pervading and enveloping mystery so thick it’s almost tangible.

This is an Innocence Mission record that feels visceral, sensual: Karen has professed inspiration from bossa nova singers like Astrud Gilberto, and maybe that explains “Sun on the Square,” a warm breeze that you can practically feel on your skin. It’s masterful in how it assembles simple components—the acoustic guitar’s hum, a sprinkling of piano, a brisk ride cymbal groove—into something irreducible and breezy. Other songs feel like they hide entire worlds within them, each one a tiny diorama of immaculate detail: “Buildings in Flower” is lo-fi folk, a scratchy basement tape decorated by dancing bells and the jovial swell of a melodica. The dreamy “Shadow of the Pines” surrenders to opulence, losing itself in an oceanic wave of piano, accordion, and harmonica. “An Idea of Canoeing” builds into a cosmic swirl of voice and guitar, closer to shoegaze than to folk austerity.

While the group’s sound has seldom been so expansive, Karen’s lyrics are more economical than ever; in tight, uncluttered stanzas, she expresses the openness and vulnerability of characters who choose generosity over insularity. In “Records from Your Room,” the sound of old vinyl wafts through the windows and out into the street, a reminder to passersby of common grace, “the depths of belief, the kindness of strangers.” The genial waltz “Look out from Your Window” celebrates connection amidst separation and noise: “Look out from your window now/ Can you see me cheering for you, up and down?” Meanwhile, the hymn-like “Star of Land and Sea”—the only song here sung by Don—is a benediction into peace-making and neighborly love: “Be a light to all/ You shine/ Into darker lands/ You shine.” Maybe it’s an answer to the title song, a prayer lifted up in troubled times: “Let it ring into the air/ Let there be more kindness in the world.”

To pray for more kindness, of course, is to acknowledge the indecency of the world we live in; how often it feels bent toward cruelty. Dark edges aren’t totally foreign to this good-natured group, yet even on 1999’s Birds of My Neighborhood—their Sufjan Stevens-endorsed landmark, about a prolonged season of sorrow and doubt—there’s a sense of looming mercy and unseen hope: “The world at night has seen the greatest light,” one song says, maybe or maybe not referencing the Nativity. They’ve been reflecting that light ever since, on one album after another that proves its own point just by existing—delicate and brave, ringing with mundane and momentous kindness.