For Asheville, North Carolina's Bask, the road to their fourth album was anything but straight. The Turning arrives after a five-year stretch that felt like falling through one black hole after another. The pandemic scrapped their 2020 North American run with Elder. A European tour was just within reach when disaster struck their mountain hometown. Through it all, the band held on to each other, their sound, and the wide-open spirit that has kept them carving their own trail since 2013.

The Turning finds the band leaning into the blend of heaviness, folk, and psychedelia that has always set them apart. Drummer Scott Middleton, guitarist Ray Worth, bassist Jesse Van Note, and vocalist/guitarist Zeb Wright welcomed longtime friend Jed Willis as an official member, expanding their sound with pedal steel and fresh perspective. Together, they turned sessions at Echo Mountain Recording with producer Kenny Harrington into a concept record that straddles cosmic rock and Appalachian roots, or what they call, "Heavy Americana."

The album’s story follows The Rider, a heroine whose path collides with The Traveller, an ageless gunslinger with questionable motives. From the trumpet-haunted opener “In The Heat of the Dying Sun” to the ghost town drift of “Long Lost Light,” the record folds in galloping riffs, sludgy chords, and pastoral space rock. It is as cinematic as a Hollywood western and as personal as the band’s own recent struggles.

Those struggles are etched deep into the music. Hurricane Helene arrived just weeks after tracking wrapped, flooding their practice space and throwing the band into uncertainty. Yet that same turbulence shaped the record’s emotional weight. Cellist Franklin Keel’s aching bends on “Long Lost Light” offered the catharsis they needed to finish.

From their first record American Hollow to the snow-sheened III, Bask have grown without being boxed in. The Turning pushes that growth further, from the propulsive folk-prog of lead single “Dig My Heels” to the closing title track’s stampede toward the unknown. “We’re not put in a box,” Van Note says, and it shows.

After twelve years in Asheville, marriages, children, near-breakups, and miles of touring with the likes of High on Fire, Black Tusk, and Weedeater, Bask still sound like their own time and place. The Turning is proof that even after storms, literal and otherwise, they are still riding together toward whatever comes next.