Once in a great while, a true concept album gets made. It doesn’t preach or pander; its narrative serves not as a crutch, but as a framework through which its creators explore actual, fallible emotion and musically ambitious composition. Sometimes, even, the expression of its theme isn’t so abstract as to be unrecognizable to the uninitiated (we’re looking at you, In The Aeroplane over the Sea).

So it is with Hospice, the breakthrough album from Brooklyn, NY’s taxidermically named The Antlers, a trio that this year suddenly turned a lot of horn-free heads. The band—frontman Peter Silberman, multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and percussionist Michael Lerner—self-released Hospice this March in their impatience to have it heard and, subsequently, sold out of it. “We ended up kind of in the deep end, the good side of that, with people wanting to buy it,” Cicci says. “We didn’t really have distribution, so we didn’t have a way of getting it to the record stores in L.A. or Toronto or anything like that.” Unwilling to wait months for a label to put out the album, it wasx Frenchkiss Records (founded by Les Savy Fav’s Syd Butler) that ultimately secured the rights to Hospice’s August re-issue, promising speed instead of complex, lengthy production cycles.

Bolstered by this new exposure, The Antlers have finally gotten the opportunity to let Hospice speak—or rather, wail—for itself. The album comprises nine movements, all with one-word names, chronicling the death of a loved one and the emotional fallout thereafter. Silberman’s voice breaks from full-feeling tenor into strangled, wrenching falsetto as he sings of pain, verbal abuse, hallucinations, grief and the surreality of it all. The band creates a sonic spectacle composed alternately of simple folk, shimmering ambient tones and fleeting anthems, notes dazzling, wobbling and fading out like the smoke after fireworks.

So, yes, it’s an album about someone dying. But what’s surprising—what has probably appealed to The Antlers’ rising number of fans—is that it discusses more than that. “The entire record is not about preserving a moment that’s tragic or sad or depressing,” Cicci says. “It’s just the starting point. I think what the record is more about is what your personal response is. It’s everything that follows.”

The song “Bear,” perhaps Hospice’s best example of this duality, transitions suddenly from a quiet lament into an ecstatic, quickly strummed acoustic dance about youth or the lack thereof; it oozes hope. “It’s more about the process of all that and overcoming it, having something very serious that happened and how it changes you and how it makes you a better person,” Cicci says. “You know, what’s next. How you can go on without a person here that was here before.” He adds that the theme wasn’t premeditated; like real life events, it just developed like that.

What of the club circuit, then, the numerous shows The Antlers have played and are continuing to play? With an emotional narrative that reveals itself basically chronologically on their album, and with quiet moments that are almost more powerful than the loud, how can a live audience experience and appreciate these subtleties? “A lot of things get lost, especially in a live show,” Cicci says. “People don’t really hear lyrics that easily, so that’s why if a live show’s so dependent on lyrics, it can end up just seeming quiet and slow and boring.” As with the process of writing and recording Hospice, Cicci says, making these songs good to hear live has been more of an organic process of adapting to a different medium than a forced change. “We just let it take a life of its own; we experimented a lot, and it ended up this big wash of sound with lots of layers,” he says. “I think it works really well with a live show. We’re trying to convey the same sort of emotions, but without the subtleties, necessarily.”

The same tenet applies to the band’s songwriting moving forward, too, Cicci explains. Like someone coping with hardship, The Antlers have decided to deal with things as they come. Though he expresses a wish never to make an album with totally disconnected themes, forcing another concept album is the furthest thing from the trio’s collective mind. “This record, it all sort of came out as we recorded it, and it wasn’t all planned,” he says. “We won’t limit ourselves. We’ll just find our way as we go and let ourselves get crazy if we want.”

Julia Reidy

WHO	Minus the Bear, The Antlers, Twin Tigers
WHERE	40 Watt Club
WHEN	Thursday, Nov. 12
HOW MUCH	$12 (adv.)