Pinegrove: Cardinal Vinyl LP

Why you'll love it

This Run For Cover LP comes with a download card. Cardinal won wide critical acclaim and turned up on many national year-end best-of lists for 2016.

This edition

Download card included
Original eight-track album

About the album

Moving to the big city is supposed to be the making of a band. Pinegrove's Evan Stephens Hall tried Brooklyn, then went home to Montclair, New Jersey, where he and his childhood friend, drummer Zack Levine, made Cardinal in their parents' basements, with a little extra recording at the Owlery in Chicago.

Hall's lyrics are semi-autobiographical, circling love, space and distance, and the band plays them with a front-porch twang and a hearty indie rock kick. "Old Friends" opens in a rush, "Cadmium" and "Then Again" pile up sweet, sad harmonies, and "Aphasia" builds to a shout-along you'll be humming for days. "Size of the Moon" glows, and "New Friends" closes the circle the opener started. Hall designed the cover himself, two interconnected squares meant to capture the same themes.

Run For Cover signed them after Hall shared the finished record with friends, including Cam Boucher of Sorority Noise, and a long run of US and European tours followed. Eight songs, two basements and a lot of goodwill; it remains the most persuasive argument we know for living with your parents a bit longer.

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