The 10-piece psychedelic indie folk collective Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have premiered their fourth album, PersonA on the Guardian. It is the culmination of an intense period of change for the band, which began in 2014 with the sudden departure of founding member Jade Castrinos.
Alex Ebert, with whom she shared lead singer duties, doesn’t shy away from discussing Castrinos and how in 2014 she was uninvited from the band’s tour. “We hadn’t been getting along,” he says. “I felt we all needed some space, and that she could use some space too. Touring is tough, but far tougher when relationships are stressed. It had just come to that.”
The lineup change forced the band to “elevate” their musicianship, he says. “I realised I was no longer going to be able to lean on that cutesy boy-girl dynamic.”
For a long while the eclectic US band was “a social experiment first, musicians second” – a dynamic that has since flipped. “My reverence for music has eclipsed my infatuation with ‘unprofessionalising professionalism’, as I used to gleefully say.
“That aspect now plays second fiddle to the music. I don’t get quite as happy at that musical messiness as I once did.”
He describes the band’s current trajectory, somewhat elliptically, as “the slopey side of a slow triangle”.
The band’s fourth album draws on a greater contribution of songwriting by the other members of the ensemble (Mark Noseworthy, Orpheo McCord, Josh Collazo, Christian Letts, Nico Aglietti, Seth Ford-Young, Mitchell Yoshida, Christopher Richard and Stewart Cole).
Ebert says PersonA, “was really just to explore the edges of ourselves – to see what kind of musicians we had become, what kind of band we had become”.
• The Guardian’s album stream of PersonA has ended
