Three years later, everyone is still talking about Samuel T. Herring’s dancing. If the details of indie rock’s most beloved fairytale have somehow escaped you, in March 2014, Future Islands performed their song “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on “Letterman.” Vibrating with intensity, Herring beat his chest, growled, and bobbed like the sneakiest featherweight in a heartfelt display that went viral and minted the Baltimore trio’s fortunes. The cult band became a fiercely in-demand live act—they played their 1000th show while on the Singles tour, and recently said that they could still be touring that record if they wanted to. The accidental origins of Herring’s dance came in 2004, when a car ran over his foot before a show. By taking this glorious accident primetime, you can’t help but wonder if he’s slightly shot himself in it, too.

Becoming public property on your fifth album is a tricky proposition—harder, possibly, than the so-called difficult second album after a breakthrough debut. By Singles, much of Future Islands’ fundamental development was behind them. The jittery mania of their 2008 debut Wave Like Home had smoothed into starry-eyed synth-pop melodrama, where New Order’s bass lines met the pop fantasias of OMD and A-Ha. As Future Islands reached maturity, their fanbase ballooned on the back of a caricature and a single. How do you move on from that? Do you stay warm in the relatively secure spotlight? Or do you twist away and risk losing the more fair-weather elements? How many bands even take creative leaps 14 years after hopping in a van together, as they first did as Art Lord & the Self - Portraits? The Far Field, Future Islands’ fifth album, skews towards the former.

If Singles stepped up to meet the world, The Far Field mostly shrinks at its gaze. Future Islands have talked about the exhaustion and doubts that arose on their long tour, and this record’s insular focus plays like a protective shield. The scaffolding remains, but the upholstery is threadbare. Though the sound is familiar, the structures are less bombastic and their former gleam is somewhat muted. And as he agonizes over the legacy of two failed relationships—one recent, one canonical—Herring sounds utterly defeated. Although their circumstances are different, his forlorn performance recalls that of Nick Cave on Skeleton Tree and the unbearable sadness of diminished titans. While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.

The album takes more than its name from a poem by American writer Theodore Roethke. (Future Islands’ 2010 record In Evening Air is also named after one of his works.) Herring has replaced his simple lyrical scheme—sun/moon, day/night—with knottier, more poetic lines. Sometimes they’re too much. “No lack of ‘wouldn’t’ could be my undoing/No lack of trying/No lack of sighing, ‘loo,’” he rasps on the despondent “Aladdin,” kind of proving his point. Yet his grandiose phrasing conveys the desperation he feels as he grapples with lost relationships—and more so, with what it means to live with longing and regret at his core. “Is this a desperate wish for dying, or a wish that dying cease?” he asks no one in particular on “Cave,” letting Gerrit Welmers’ synth wash over his question. “The fear that keeps me going and going and going/Is the same fear that brings me to my knees.” Simply put, on the hurtling “Ran,” “What’s a song without you/When every song I write is about you?”

Herring grieves, loses faith, and flounders across The Far Field, and nowhere more so than on “Through the Roses,” the album’s emotional peak. He has candidly referred to it as “a suicide song,” written on a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains. “It just hit me in that moment,” he told Mojo, “this great sense of loneliness. I’d reached all my goals but all I found was the same loneliness.” He plots the distance between his joyous public persona and private sorrow, and exposes the sadness behind the spectacle: “I’m scared,” he sings, his voice cracking. “That I can’t pull through.” As “the clutch of nothing, the curse of wanting takes me whole,” he contemplates cutting his wrists. Herring has always lucidly understood the band’s appeal—that his unabashed exuberance allows their audiences to let out their repressed emotions, too. The naked pain of “Through the Roses” is both a beautiful song, and a profound gesture of trust and generosity from Herring. “But we can pull through together, together, together,” he insists at the end, and you believe him.

The mood lightens in The Far Field’s second half as Herring does his best to move on. A impish, glassy rhythm peps up “North Star,” and on “Candles,” Future Islands try something totally different—a dubby yacht rock number that sounds almost comically seductive, but finds Herring serving up one of his quintessentially moony tributes. It works perfectly. “Baby I know,” he croons like a regular lounge lizard, “a little candle like you don’t deserve the hurt you’re going through.” And while it’s sort of a shame that Future Islands didn’t fill The Far Field with 12 songs as gorgeous and immediate as “Shadows,” the sadness that came before only makes Herring’s duet with Debbie Harry all the more wonderful. Hearing his voice age and tremble throughout the record gives it gravitas. Hearing Harry, at 71, sound wise and saucy and full of promise makes its hopefulness seem real. “These old shadows parade you like a fool!” she exclaims, trying to lure him back into the light.

Future Islands could easily have become single-trick jesters after “Seasons,” but The Far Field finds salvation in tragedy. Speaking with The New York Times recently, Herring said that he hadn’t yet worked out dance moves for this album. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Hopefully people aren’t bummed out, like, ‘Where’s the new thing?’” You’d hope, for an album this tender, that this time their presence alone will be enough.