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**Half Moon Run - Sun Leads Me On**
★★★★☆

There's something gloriously unhinged about Half Moon Run's third full-length offering, a record that finds the Montreal trio abandoning the carefully constructed indie-folk frameworks of their earlier work in favour of something altogether more feral and immediate. *Sun Leads Me On* arrives four years after 2016's *A Blemish in the Great Light*, a gap that might suggest careful deliberation but actually masks a period of creative restlessness that nearly tore the band apart.

Devon Portielje, Dylan Phillips, and Conner Molander had reached something of an impasse following extensive touring behind their previous album. The meticulous layering and pristine harmonies that had defined their sound – that Fleet Foxes-meets-Bon Iver aesthetic that had served them so well – began to feel like a straitjacket. Rather than retreat to their usual rural hideaways, they decamped to a ramshackle studio in the Laurentian Mountains with producer Marcus Paquin, determined to capture something rawer, more visceral.

The results are immediately apparent on opener "She Wants to Know," where Portielje's falsetto – once deployed with surgical precision – now cracks and soars with abandon over a rhythm section that sounds like it's perpetually on the verge of collapse. It's thrilling in the way that watching a tightrope walker without a net is thrilling. The song establishes the album's central tension between control and chaos, between the band's innate melodic gifts and their newfound desire to let things fall apart in interesting ways.

This isn't to suggest that Half Moon Run have completely abandoned their strengths. The gorgeous "Grow Into Love" finds them operating in familiar territory – intricate guitar interplay, stacked vocals, lyrics that gesture toward the profound without quite getting there – but even here there's a looseness, a sense of air in the mix that their previous work sometimes lacked. Phillips' drumming, in particular, has shed much of its programmatic precision in favour of something more human and fallible.

The album's centrepiece, "Then Again," represents perhaps the band's finest achievement to date, a seven-minute sprawl that begins as a gentle folk meditation before gradually morphing into something approaching krautrock. Molander's bass takes on an almost hypnotic quality, while layers of guitar and synthesizer build to a climax that feels genuinely cathartic rather than merely loud. It's the sound of a band finally comfortable with contradiction, with the idea that songs don't need to resolve neatly or make perfect sense.

Elsewhere, "Alco" finds them flirting with electronic textures that would have seemed unthinkable on earlier releases, while "Favourite Boy" strips things back to just voice and guitar with devastating effect. Portielje has always been the band's most compelling vocalist, but here he sounds genuinely vulnerable, his voice carrying the weight of genuine experience rather than carefully crafted sentiment.

The album isn't without its missteps. "Middle Ground" feels like a retreat to safer territory, its chorus a bit too eager to please, while "Hands in the Garden" gets lost in its own atmospheric ambitions. But these moments feel like necessary breathing space in what is otherwise a remarkably cohesive statement of intent.

Lyrically, the band has always trafficked in a kind of studied vagueness, and while that hasn't entirely changed, there's more specificity here, more sense of actual stakes. The title track, which closes the album, finds Portielje grappling with questions of faith and doubt with a directness that's both surprising and affecting. "The sun leads me on," he repeats, and for once it doesn't feel like empty mysticism but genuine searching.

In the years since its release, *Sun Leads Me On* has gradually revealed itself as something of a sleeper classic, the kind of album that rewards patience and reveals new details with each listen. It marked a crucial evolution for Half Moon Run, proving that a band could mature without losing their essential mystery. In a landscape increasingly dominated by algorithmic precision and focus-grouped sentiment, there's something deeply refreshing about a record that's willing to risk failure in pursuit of something genuinely felt.

More importantly, it established Half Moon Run as more than just another indie-folk outfit with good harmonies. They'd become something rarer: a band unafraid of their own contradictions.