Typically, if a band is going to selftitle an album, it’s their first. Mipso, on the other hand, waited until their fifth.

“We thought, ‘Well, what’s the point of having such a weird band name if we can’t use it for a record title?’” guitarist Joseph Terrell says with a chuckle. “But really, the reason is that we’ve been making records together for long enough that I feel like, for some reason, we hit a certain stride on this one—we finally felt like we understood how to work together. It was like, ‘Yeah, we know who we are now. Let’s call it Mipso.’”

Indeed, since Terrell, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, bassist Wood Robinson and fiddle player Libby Rodenbough first gained notoriety at UNC Chapel Hill thanks to their original, brooding brand of alt-country, they’ve accomplished quite a bit, from touring Japan to performing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and topping Billboard’s Bluegrass chart.

However, this new LP—their first for Rounder Records— found them reconnecting with their roots, and each other, more than ever before. The quartet recorded Mipso at the serene Echo Mountain studio in their home state of North Carolina, coming to terms with the strife that had brewed in the wake of their previous album, Edges Run. By all accounts, following that acclaimed LP, Mipso was on the brink of dissolution.

“We had such a hard time making the last record,” Terrell admits. “It brought all these long-term interpersonal style differences and opinion differences to the fore.”

But, often, it’s darkest before the dawn. And Mipso emerged from those troubles with a newfound resolve and a commitment to their musical union.

“Maybe as younger musicians, we had bigger heads about what we thought the record should be,” Terrell adds. “So we had room for disappointment. But, taking a step back, the process is the point, the collaboration is the point. We love each other; we’re like husbands and wives now.”

Certainly, Echo Mountain helped with that spirit of reconciliation. A renovated church, it juxtaposes a well-worn Neve console with stained glass windows and high ceilings, adding to the airy, sometimes-eerie quality of Mipso’s 12 tracks. The band also enlisted producer/“mad scientist” Sandro Perri to usher the songs along, allowing their compositions enough room to change shape and grow naturally. And, by the time they completed a week-long writing retreat at a friend’s barn in Chapel Hill, they had officially entered their most collaborative era to date.

“In this day and age, you definitely can make a record in your basement, and that’s great. But, when you’re trying to bear your heart and soul with each other, it’s like an intensive two-week therapy summer camp that’s sort of fun and kind of heart-wrenching,” Terrell says. “You’re making something that you want to be beautiful. And I think that it helps not to be in your basement. It helps to be in a place that provides you with an occasion that you can rise to.”

And while the band quickly pushed the LP’s release from the spring to the fall of 2020, hoping that the pandemic would have subsided by then, they eventually realized that they had to think outside the box in other ways too. With touring halted indefinitely, the band threw together a pair of online broadcasts—accurately titled The Mipso Show—which gave them the opportunity to connect with fans and raise money for a slew of independent venues hurting from COVID-19 closures. 

“Most of the usual ways that we gauge what an album release feels like are gone,” Terrell reflects. “The first six months after releasing an album are usually this whirlwind of touring and driving thousands of miles— entering in this whole new phase of life, built on an album’s songs. So it’s been weird to try and feel the catharsis of putting out an album without any of that stuff.”

Though the quartet have yet to perform a number of Mipso’s tracks live, they were able to highlight a few during The Mipso Show. And it seems that, over time, the album’s haunting folk sound has been weirdly retrofitted to the COVID-19 age. “There’s a general sense of uneasiness, or discomfort, with the modern world in a lot of these songs,” Terrell says. “I think the pandemic has forced us all to look at a lot of the ways that the world was already broken. It’s just made it a lot more obvious so we can’t ignore it anymore. And these songs come from this place of like, ‘If we stop and pause and look around, then I don’t think a lot of things are as OK as we pretend that they are.’”

Specifically, Terrell draws parallels between the surreal past few months and album opener “Never Knew You Were Gone,” which imagines the world without humans. The last verse paints of picture of a completely silent world, where all the cities are empty. “That’s what it feels like now,” Terrell concludes. “It’s not that humans are gone, but everything that we’ve built has paused. So we have to look at it from a different light.