For nearly ten years, Hawktail bassist Paul Kowert has kept a computer folder of musical seeds—a digital root cellar of voice memos, studio outtakes, concert tapes. “I’ve been a cataloguer of stuff,” Kowert tells me from his hotel in Telluride (in addition to his work with Hawktail, Kowert is kicking off a summer tour as one-fifth of the Grammy Award-winning quintet Punch Brothers). “Periodically, I would go through the folder looking around, and I kept coming back to this file.”

“This file” is a thirty-second voice memo from 2016. “We called it ‘Complete Sound,’” Jordan Tice, guitarist, recalls. “It’s me just strumming… then Britt found this syncopated rhythm. We were kinda like, oh stop that’s really cool. Then Paul grabbed his iPhone and hit record.” Zooming in from Nashville, Tice sings the riff of “Complete Sound”—it’s the B-section of “Updraft,” one of the standout tracks on Hawktail’s newest release. “You come up with things and you don’t know what to do with them yet,” Tice explains, “you don’t have the context or the experience to bring it around home base yet.”

In the six years since “Complete Sound”—years that saw the release of Hawktail’s acclaimed freshman and sophomore efforts, Unless (2018) and Formations (2020)—Hawktail has developed not only the context and experience necessary to bring the “Complete Sound” musical seed to fruition, but those elements necessary to craft the quartet’s most ambitious album yet.