Listen to The Antlers at Daytrotter on This Day in 2009

Indie folksters The Antlers have been off the grid for a while. Their most recent album, Familiars, dropped in 2014 to the tune of critical acclaim (from us at Paste, included), and, since then, they haven’t worked on much as a group. However, frontman Peter Silberman released his debut solo record, Impermanence, last year, just a few months prior to when breakup rumors started circling. The Brooklyn-based trio, which also includes multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and and drummer Michael Lerner, is definitely on hiatus, but whether or not they’ll make music again is still unclear.

On this day (Oct. 30) in 2009, following the release of their fourth studio album, 2011’s Burst Apart (which we named one of the 100 best indie folk albums), The Antlers carved out time for a Daytrotter session at Big Orange Studios in Austin, Texas, which you can hear below. The played four tracks from that record: “No Widows,” “Parentheses,” “Rolled Together” and “Hounds.”

Daytrotter’s Sean Moeller waxed poetic on The Anters’ dreamy synth-folk in their session’s accompanying essay:

The trio of musicians…[put] you in a menagerie without the animals. The animals are replaced with conflicting emotions – the dreaminess of lead singer Peter Silberman’s vocals, the praying mantis-like sizzles of Darby Cicci synths on “Parentheses” and the push along sleuthing of late night drums from stick man Michael Lerner – and they’re all finding ways to coexist, to slide by and over one another, rubbing hides and causing friction. These are competing feelings that always seem as if they’re moments away from turning into something else at any second […] Silberman, you can tell, is a worrier, and these are his shaking feelings. He’s dressing them up in dashing suits and lustrous scarves, but beneath it all are these shakes. We can feel them, even if lightly, and they’re menacing. We know it’s just a matter of time before we feel the full extent.

Again, you can listen to The Antlers’ 2009 Daytrotter session below. Revisit our 2017 conversation with Peter Silberman here, and the Paste review of Impermanence here.