To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when you’re busy making other albums. After recording 2022’s Revival, singer-songwriter Judah Akers realized that, rather than powering through another uplifting album, he had to write about his own imploding life.

It was time. Over their decade as Nashville’s crossover folk heroes Judah & the Lion, Akers and mandolinist Brian Macdonald had built a strong enough foundation to explore both darkness and light. Not long after college, the hardcore fans of the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons made their 2014 debut, Kids These Days, then broke through with the genre-blending Folk Hop ‘n’ Roll in 2016. With 2019’s Pep Talks, they revealed the musical confidence to grapple with real life struggles, setting Akers’ candid dispatches on alcoholism and family trauma to their cohering mix of acoustic roots and Alt Rock. But throughout the creation of 2022’s Revival, after the departure of longtime banjo player Nate Zuercher, Akers kept a tight lid on some grinding personal agony that was keeping him frozen, both creatively and in life.

The band had made Revival during the pandemic, with the intention of bringing more positivity to the world. But during its creation, “I was fighting for my marriage, going crazy, and getting sick,” says Akers, 33. “I fought writing about what I was going through. Finally, a friend told me, ‘If you don't write about the biggest heartbreak of your life, you can’t be honest in your work.’ And he was right.” Since Akers and Macdonald are both sons of therapists, ideas like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief were relatively close at hand, and once Akers committed to the harder material, the concept emerged as an almost inevitable album conceit. “It gave us a way to embody the tough and sometimes really negative emotions that I deal with in songs, but within a larger framework of empathy, forgiveness, and hope.”

Like Kübler-Ross’s model, the deluxe 24-track album begins with “Denial,” a hushed invocation over wordless choral voices, the singer speaking from within an unruly psychic process: Just when I thought that I had accepted it/I’d just sink into another depression. The song is like “opening the door to a house,” Akers explains. “Where you want to indicate all the rooms a visitor will find inside, the range of experiences they’ll have.” It also enacts a subtly destabilizing effect in the track itself, something they achieved by playing the mixing board's faders like an instrument—foregrounding first autotuned vocals then raw ones, acoustic instruments then synth washes—as if pulling different feelings to the surface. “We wanted it to feel as if all the emotions from the record were spinning around you,” Macdonald says.

This sound flows directly into “Heartbreak Syndrome,” titled for an actual physical diagnosis that Akers received from a doctor after his left arm got so weak that he could barely hold a guitar. The music suggests a gathering strength—a steady 4/4 beat, stark Tom Petty-like guitar riff—while the lyrics give harrowing snapshots of jealousy-deranged paranoia: Keep driving around east of our downtown/Every black jeep that I see is making me turn around. The mood of both this nocturnal driving song and the next—spicily titled, with apologies to Angelenos "F L.A."—is seductive and somewhat perversely feel-good. “Because in a way, denial can feel good,” Akers explains. But the hints of mania in the music's blissful sheen turn darker as the grungy "New Tattoo" all but drives Denial off a cliff: the speaker on a blacked-out motorcycle, running lights and taking out stop signs in a desperate flight from pain that can't be outrun, any more than a new tattoo erases pain and damage underneath. "We wanted something intense, powerful, and angry," Akers says, saluting Macdonald's arena-rock guitar heroics at the end of the song. "It's such a fun solo that he did there, tapping into all these Queen tones and gestures."

Over the years, as the band stepped further into the space of hip-hop and EDM technology, mandolinist Macdonald developed an ominous studio skillset, initially by embracing his own technological naivete. “When I first started playing mandolin it was a really, really creative time, because your fingers don't have any memory of what you’re trying to play. You have this innocence that’s hard to maintain.” He found electronic instruments helped foster this sense of exploration, while framing new moods. “I prefer analog synths, because I really want to have my hands on it and play it like an instrument,” Macdonald says. “A lot of times I'm plugging in patch cables without knowing what sound I’ll get, and that sense of unpredictability really suited this material.”

As The Process moves through its Denial and Anger stages, the music finds what Akers describes as a “folk-meets-Weezer vibe,” dosed with “the mischievous pettiness and comic relief of Taylor Swift.” “We wanted songs like ‘Floating in the Night’ and ‘Great Decisions’ to feel anthemic, so our listeners could really own that anger—something I wasn’t encouraged to do as a southern boy growing up in Middle Tennessee.” The Anger section breaks open with the rave-up “Son of A Gun,” which Akers co-sings with Judah & the Lion’s friend, the singer-songwriter Kristine “K Flay” Flaherty: “Misfit songs in a beat-up truck/I got 24 ways of not giving a single—" etc., a roar of exasperation coated in a harmonized sugar rush of boy-girl pop vocals.

After the instrumental “aBrgaining” chimes the arrival of this new stage, “Starting Over” comes on like a cold, hard morning: Akers’ unprocessed voice opens with a clear, down-home holler, his voice bringing shades of old-time mountain-death ballads to a clear-eyed present: I sold off all of the things we bought together/All of our dreams and all of our old college sweaters. “We wanted the music to feel like remnants of our older stuff,” Akers explains. “Classic guitar with nylon strings, that folk spirit, and the softness that comes with it." "Body & Soul" pulls the focus tighter, opening with Akers in an unusually low vocal register to foreground stream-of- consciousness lyrics that grapple with the slippery nature of spiritual bargaining. "There's this sense of wrestling," Akers says. "Whether it's with God, with yourself, or with life, it's a really physical thing."

The group co-wrote this more experimental song with co-producer Micah Tawlks in the studio, but when its verses give way to a soaring anthemic chorus—reminiscent of Coldplay, The National, or vintage Judah & the Lion—it cuts the darkness like a shaft of light: Take time/You’re gonna be alright/Don’t fight when/Body and soul collide. "It's a cry of hope," Akers says. "To my younger self and anyone who's going through it." And even as it marks a final descent into Depression, "Sad Eyes" offers the relief of a different texture—the plangent indie feel of Fleet Foxes or Sufjan Stevens—and a different perspective, as Macdonald sings vocals on a song he largely composed himself. "All’s well that ends well," it begins. "But I am not." Macdonald began it shortly after moving back home from Sweden and regrouping with Akers for the first time in over a year. "I think he could see all this pain in my eyes, and kind of feel it," Akers says. "So in this really sweet act of empathy he wrote this song"—and ceded the role of sounding board, devil's advocate, and co-producer to Akers.