Green Eyes Witch Hands is a duo of Canadian brothers based in Bathurst, New Brunswick, which is a town that I had never heard of until I heard of this band. Bathurst’s population falls well under 15,000 inhabitants; its modest downtown faces a recessed body of water. If you would like to have a nice, low-key multimedia experience, I would suggest looking at still images of the town while listening to The Lumberyard, Green Eyes Witch Hands’s newest release. Personally, I lingered on one snowcapped picture in particular. As an acoustic guitar strummed in the background, I was practically living a different life.

The band works in a variety of contemporary indie modes—there’s some cloud rock here, there’s some indietronica, there’s some emo rap—but bonds them together through the power of a less specific kind of songwriting, the kind rooted in decades upon decades of folk and rock. It’s a forward-thinking indie record, the sound of two brothers incubating their own musical vernacular, built on the back of a contemporary moment but, in its execution, knocking against the timeless.