Sufjan Stevens once described his enduring love of Pennsylvania’s the Innocence Mission by explaining that for all his awe at big songs, Broadway musicals and all, he would always return to “small songs which make careful observations about everyday life”. After meeting in a high school play, the band have made a dozen such albums since their 1989 debut, each based around frontwoman Karen Peris’s childlike, otherworldly vocal. On this exquisite 13th studio album, the sparse instrumentation and soft focus, lo-fi production gives the music an affectingly ethereal, distant quality, which the singer-songwriter says is intended to rekindle “the half-remembered beauty of singalongs of our 1970s childhoods”.
