The Antlers – the beloved band and recording project of Peter Silberman – have announced their eagerly awaited new album, Blight; their first new studio album in over four years. The follow-up to 2021’s rustic, folk-tinged Green to Gold, Blight reckons with our passively destructive tendencies – absentminded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world. The album is a work of meticulous world-building, teeming with ear candy and surprising stylistic shifts. Silberman has been confronting weighty matters ever since The Antlers’ 2009 breakthrough Hospice. Its surprise popularity placed the Antlers on a rapid ascent, touring globally, playing major festivals, and supporting such luminaries as The National and Explosions in the Sky. The music that followed grew The Antlers’ sizable following while resisting the impulse to rehash their initial success; the electronic pop of 2011’s Burst Apart, the aquatic psychedelia of 2012’s Undersea EP, and the brass-laden soul of 2014’s Familiars. Sadly, an unexpected hearing incident left Silberman temporarily deaf in one ear and hypersensitive to sound. Putting The Antlers on pause, he made 2017’s Impermanence, a meditative, minimal solo album. After regaining his hearing and recovering from vocal cord surgery, Silberman and longtime drummer Michael Lerner revived The Antlers for 2021’s Green to Gold. Blight arrives via Transgressive Records on Friday, October 10.