When Fleet Foxes’ new album, “Crack-Up,” is released on Friday, June 16th, it will be more than six years since “Helplessness Blues.” But the band is returning with a weighty, ambitious album of shape-shifting songs that builds on the exacting finger-plucked guitar melodies and cooing multipart harmonies central to its earlier music. At a time when indie-rock seems be growing more culturally marginal by the day, “Crack-Up” is a defiant artistic statement, an album that dares to feel important. It leaked more than a month before its scheduled release date, a frustrating turn of events but one the band ultimately found encouraging.
Fleet Foxes’ “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me” from the 2017 album Crack-Up. pictured Hiroshi Hamaya’s “Peaks of Takachiho Volcano”,
The Fat Angel Sings 