Since the very beginning, every Fleet Foxes album has been surrounded with outrageous levels of hype and anticipation. Even before they ever released their debut album or its accompanying Sun Giant EP, it was clear from their early MP3s that Fleet Foxes were a once-in-a-lifetime kind of band. That debut album ended up being just as fantastic as everyone hoped, and it was praised accordingly. (It's the only debut album in the past 15 years to have topped a Pitchfork year-end list, a phenomenon that happened much more frequently in the early 2000s.) Because of its success, so much was riding on the band's 2011 sophomore album, the more expansive and psychedelic Helplessness Blues, and that album delivered too. Then came a hiatus, so when Fleet Foxes finally returned with 2017's proggy Crack-Up, they were once again faced with high expectations to meet, because this time they had to live up to the hype that tends to come with "reunion" albums. Once again they met or even exceeded expectations, but they’d be the first to admit the pressure of those expectations did get to them. "I have spent more time than I'm happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety," frontman Robin Pecknold wrote in a lengthy statement accompanying their fourth album Shore. "Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them... I've never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could."
He says that anxiety started to consume him once again during the writing process for Shore, but after he watched the pandemic escalate and watched and participated in protests against systemic injustice, "most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together." He ended up completing the album and writing all of its lyrics during lockdown, and you can hear in the finished product how Robin ended up approaching this one without worrying so much about it on a grander scale. He said he was influenced by Arthur Russell, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Michael Nau, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, The Roches, João Gilberto, and others, "music that is simultaneously complex and elemental, 'sophisticated' and humane, propulsive rhythmically but feathery melodically," and that comes through on the new album. It's Robin's warmest, most relaxed music yet, and it makes sense that he decided to announce the album 24 hours before releasing it. There was no time to let a crazy amount of anticipation build up, and that was really the best way to put these songs out into the world. They don't mark the same leap in ambition that each previous Fleet Foxes album took from the last, and they exist almost entirely outside of today's musical zeitgeist, but none of that matters once you click play. Robin remains an extremely gifted songwriter, and these songs find him weaving in deceptively simple arrangements and some of the most instantly-satisfying melodies he's written yet.