It is 6:40 am. I’m leaving my house to go to work. I’m walking to the stop where I meet a colleague who’s going to pick me up. Carpooling has become a routine. Walking through the morning mist after a rainy night is also a routine. But the most important routine is putting my headphones on, navigating through my iPod searching for an artist that I can listen in my short walk. Two or three songs are the only thing I can listen before I get in my colleague’s car and he cranks up his Spotify playlist (which is also a routine) and listen to music that, a great part of it, honestly, I don’t like.

That day, one name came across my mind. It’s a band that I don’t listen to very often but that I’m sure I’ll never delete it from my music library. And I’ve actually read their name recently, in an article from a music website about the 10th anniversary of a great record. The band: The Antlers, the record: Hospice. So, I put it on. Of course, as I said, I only listened to the first three songs, but that was more than enough. Hospice is an album that inevitably evoques feelings, thoughts and immediate emotions. That is, in great part, because it is a sad record. However, there’s much more complexity to that sadness than it can appear at first. I finished listening the album throughout the day, lightening up the whole routine of a normal Tuesday.

Ten years have passed since the release of Hospice and it hasn’t lost any of its emotional power. Lyric after lyric, arrangement after arrangement, Peter Silberman, the band’s lead vocalist and lyricist, crafted a story so affecting surrounded by sounds equally devastating. Silberman and company use, acoustic guitars, thundering drums, horns and piano to create and atmosphere of love and loss that is timeless.

The album describes the relationship between a hospice worker and a terminally-ill female patient, that suffers of bone cancer. They fell in love and her condition threatens the nature of their romance, serving as a metaphor for an emotionally abusive relationship. Peter Silberman’s sweet and gentle voice, that at times explodes along with the music, is the perfect medium to portray the feelings of the man in the story. How much is autobiographical, we can only speculate, but Silberman’s voice makes it feel real and tangible. There’s his early description of how the nurse meets the patient in ‘Kettering’ and the eventual beginning of their relationship’s doom in ‘Two’. The fact that all of this is metaphorical and yet the band makes it feel exactly as relatable as this hard situation is for all the people that have lived it, give the album a high degree of abstraction and speaks of the prowess of the band as musicians and of Silberman as a songwriter.

Musically, The Antlers perfect their own brand of emotionally charged indie rock. The instrumentation doesn’t always evoke exactly the feelings that are described in the lyrics but it always goes along nicely with them. There’s the shoegazy instrumental explosion in ‘Sylvia’, the up-tempo breezy melody of the chorus in ‘Bear’ and the repetitive chords of ‘Two’ which are sweet until they become a melancholic march. The album features banjos, harps, harmonica, horns and, I just learned, the great Sharon van Etten shares her voice in a few songs. The eclectic use of different sounds and arrangements gives the album a notable depth, a high level of nuance and focus and finally, works as the ideal background to the whole devastating narrative.

Few times a decade comes an album like this one. I’m sure that everyone that has listened to Hospice can unanimously agree in its poignancy. We don’t know if Silberman is projecting passages of his life or if he only, quite expertly, described what it is to be part of a relationship that was doomed to fail, a relationship that inexplicably seems essential to the two people that are part of it, and yet both know it’s causing more damage than they can bear. I can’t be sure if you knew this album, I didn’t a few years ago, I can only imagine how out of place it may have been in the indie scene of 2009, but at the same time it is an indispensable moment on it. So, if you haven’t, give it a listen. You won’t regret it, but there’s a chance you’ll need a tissue.