Album Stream: The Eastern Sea - Plague

“I used to hear the birch leaves rattle through my spine,” frontman Matthew Hines sings on the opener to Plague, his stunning full-length debut with The Eastern Sea, an eclectic rock band from Austin, Texas.

The line is a fittingly poetic opening for a poetic album: Plague’s lyrics are so finely composed you could almost call it for a long-form poem set to music. Back in 2005, The Eastern Sea was but a small, one-man project based out of Hines’ bedroom. But Plague, out June 26 on WhiteLabBlackLab, is a seven-man effort, the result of two years of piecing together sessions in condemned complexes, private studios and houses in Central Texas.

There’s never much ice in the band’s home state, but a glacial layer—engineered by Jeff Lipton, who has mastered recordings for Bon Iver and Andrew Bird—coats all twelve tracks. Plague‘s dense lyrics and denser arrangements seem to pick up somewhere between the space Explosions in the Sky and Death Cab For Cutie last left off. That’s a pretty cool place to be for a band this young.

You can stream Plague in its entirety below.