There was a moment in the spring of 2021 when Great Grandpa didn’t know if they would go on. They had just begun work on a new album that fall, the follow-up to 2019’s critically acclaimed Four of Arrows, when they met with a moment of reckoning. Each member was being called in new directions. Al Menne moved to LA and made a solo album, Freak Accident. Dylan Hanwright got married and began producing for other bands. Cam LaFlam started selling books, later opening up his own bookstore. Pat and Carrie Goodwin moved to Denmark, had a baby and continued to write new material. But as with any good relationship built on mutual love, trust, and a mountain of shared history, the quintet—who grew up in Seattle and have been making music together for a decade—were drawn back into one another’s orbits in 2023. “Time passed and I missed my friends,” Al puts it simply. After reconnecting, the band decided to scrap most of what they had previously recorded and start afresh, this time with the new perspective of their momentous years apart. The resulting album—the prismatic, vivid, and deeply moving Patience, Moonbeam—is the sound of lifelong friends and collaborators growing up and growing together.

The phrase “patience, moonbeam,” which comes from an inside joke in Carrie’s family, is a fitting title for the album—not just because it speaks to the kind of playful familial ribbing that is a core part of the band’s dynamics, but also because it points to a fundamental element of how the album took shape over the span of many years. With patience came more freedom. Whereas Four of Arrows mostly came together in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the studio with the help of an outside producer, Patience, Moonbeam emerged slowly through a generous, generative demoing process, with Dylan at the helm of the production and mixing. With fewer constraints and more control, the band had the opportunity to explore rabbit holes, backtrack, find new ways in. They experimented with different iterations of a single song, throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. “There’s a lot of interesting texture to be found,” Al says, “when something has been worked, reworked, left to sit, and then worked again years later.”

The result is Great Grandpa’s most ambitious and confident-sounding album yet. From the sparkling pop-grunge of their first record Plastic Cough (2017), to the sprawling indie rock of Four of Arrows, the band has been on a clear trajectory of both refining and re-defining their sonic identity. Patience, Moonbeam delivers on that promise, taking the band’s DNA and elevating it. All of Great Grandpa’s signature elements are there— Pat’s nontraditional song structures and penchant for hooky melodies, Al’s soothing yet stirring lead vocals—but with a sophistication and expanded list of songwriters and sounds that mirror their years of personal growth.

Perhaps most notable is how seamlessly all five members contributed to the creation of the album, celebrating and showcasing their individual voices while still managing to create something cohesive and whole—like the refraction of a prism pouring distinct bands of color from a single beam of light. While Pat was the main songwriter on Four of Arrows and wrote much of the bedrock for Patience, Moonbeam, the writing and recording process for this album saw a looser, more inclusive atmosphere overall, with the band members citing an “open door policy” and frequently returning to the idea of what “serves the song” as an antidote to any intrusions of ego. What could suffer from a kitchen-sink approach instead comes together brilliantly, a testament to the band’s musical and spiritual connection.

Pat cites Abbey Road as an influence in this regard, both on the writing and on the band dynamics throughout the album’s creation. “They had had a lot of tension at this point in their career, figuring out who they were not as the Beatles,” he says, adding that with Abbey Road, “There are these really strong identities and flavors, but they all come together. There’s something magical about the energy where everyone’s unique voice is so strong, but everyone is just making each other better.”

These 11 songs gleam with unexpected moments that resist stylistic pin-down, swinging like a pendulum from heavy to tender, playful to weighty, in what sounds like a sonic illustration of the pains and pleasures of being alive. On “Doom,” soft formant-shifted choir explodes into the full-on bash of cymbals; looped cough-like percussion stutters behind a smooth veneer of vocals on “Kiss the Dice.” “I think we all resonate with extremes and the contrast present in our daily lives and try to express that through our song’s journeys,” Pat says. This sentiment is distilled into the lyric “every pain has thrills” on “Never Rest,” which began as a tender lullaby for the Goodwins’ son and grew outward—like a lengthening shadow—to explore the anxieties of new parenthood. The band continues to pick at the multifaceted complexities of life on groovy Portishead-inspired track “Ephemera,” which explores the transitory nature of experience through a haze of shuffling drums and synths.

At the album’s emotional core is the exhilarating lead single “Kid”—the only carry-over from the scrapped 2020 album—which unfolds like a rock opera, moving deftly through a sea of melodies and scene changes. Pat and Carrie wrote the song in the aftermath of the loss of their first pregnancy. “Things will happen when the timing is right,” Carrie reflects of that time, a sentiment that became the song’s glowing ember, and perhaps a mantra for the album itself: “All good things in time define their meaning.”

On the other side of the pendulum arc is the sense of playfulness and exuberance exemplified on tracks like “Ladybug”—whose whimsical lyrics include lines like “dressed like Donald Glover on a GQ cover”—and country-tinged song-story “Junior,” told through the eyes of a character who tromps around in a state of reckless boyhood and brags of pulling off “light crimes with my buddies all night” against a backdrop of rollicking banjo and strings.

With Patience, Moonbeam, Great Grandpa has crafted a triumphant document of what happens when your collaborators become your chosen family. When you make the decision to return to each other even after the winds of change have taken you apart. When you find that growing up and out in different directions only brings you closer together. “You had changed / But the heart of you was still the same,” they sing on “Task” a song about the experience of their reunion, which ends with the group chanting in what feels like an almost baptismal moment–as if being cleansed by the act of recommitting to one another.

“We’re all like individual swinging pendulums,” says Dylan, “and every now and then we come into sync for a few rotations. Sometimes it’s two of us, sometimes three of us, often it’s not any of us. But when it does come together, it’s really beautiful.” Like Newton’s cradle—a device in which five metal spheres click-clack against each other until they reach stasis—the quintet has found their alignment in this collection of songs. It was worth the wait.