Darlingside have released their new album ‘Everything Is Alive’.

Produced and recorded by the band and mixed by Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, Iron and Wine), the album sees the band embrace their individual strengths throughout each track.

To celebrate their album release, the band shared with us five tracks that influenced ‘Everything Is Alive’.

Daniel Rossen – Golden Mile | Listen via Spotify
I love how Daniel Rossen layers bright, strummy, percussive guitars. In this song, so much energy is generated from the scrubby wall of acoustic sounds. Songs like this one helped to influence the guitar and mandocello textures on the opening track of our album, ‘Green Light’.

John Martyn – Just Now | Listen via Spotify
Sometimes less is more. I keep coming back to John Martyn’s earnest, natural performance of this song. He doesn’t fuss over a grand production—he just finds a warm space, inhabits it, and lets the song breathe. After maximalist productions on our previous records, we wanted ‘Everything Is Alive’ to be sparer—fewer instrumental layers, and individual vocal performances rather than group harmony singing. I thought of this song often while we were working on intimate tracks like ‘Sea Dogs’, ‘Can’t Help Falling Apart’, and ‘Darkening Hour’.

Sigur Ros – Gobbledigook | Listen via Spotify
In this song, Sigur Ros overlay traditional drum kit with polyrhythmic body percussion (claps, snaps, and off-kilter measures). In particular, I like how tactile, messy, and human it sounds. Throughout our record, we combine non-traditional percussion (leg slaps, pounding on a table, claps, mechanical noises, etc) with Ben Burns’ performance on drums—see ‘Right Friend’, ‘Eliza I See’, and ‘Baking Soda’.

Beck – Morning | Listen via Spotify
Buzzy synths and Nintendo-style lead lines are set against pristine acoustic textures, and the results are plush. For me, Beck’s albums ‘Sea Change’ and ‘Morning Phase’ do a great job of mixing together electronic and acoustic textures to create deep worlds. While working on our new record, I continued to fall in love with two quirky synths: the Yamaha CS-80, and our Gameboy-sounding ‘Critter’ & ‘Guitari Septavox’, which are used on many tracks alongside the natural sounds of violin, mandolin, cello, or harmonium.

Graham Nash – Simple Man | Listen via Spotify
The distant piano sound at the beginning sounds like a piano being played in another room across a house or down a hallway. We have many iPhone voice memos that made it into final tracks on the record because they had that lo-fi, nostalgic, “special moment captured at home” energy. ‘Green Light’ is built on a looped iPhone memo of a strumming mandocello, ‘Eliza I See’ is built on a late night memo of voice and guitar whispered into a phone, and Sea Dogs began with a voice memo of playing piano early one morning at home.

You can stream Darlingside ‘Everything Is Alive’ via Spotify below: