If you're a fan of the Third Mind, then you likely already know that Jesse Sykes is a guitarist and co-lead vocalist for the psychedelic rock supergroup, but you might not know that since 1999 she has led her own band, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, which went dormant in 2011.

Fourteen years is a long time to stay silent. Long enough for guitar strings to rust, for dust to settle on amplifiers, for the world to move on to new music tastes. With Forever, I’ve Been Being Born, Jesse Sykes and her band the Sweet Hereafter return not just with a bang, but with an exhalation of songs that could no longer be held in. Their first album since 2012 comes beaming in like twilight through cathedral windows. It’s gothic Americana made with patience and carved from ache, a suite of songs that feel like they’ve already lived a thousand lives. Sykes has always summoned a voice that hovers somewhere between hymn and whisper, but here it sounds newly naked, as if the years have sanded it down to its most essential grain.

Recorded in fits and starts over nearly ten years, Forever, I’ve Been Being Born carries the looseness of an album that refused to be rushed. There are moments of elegant folk stillness, where guitars ripple like dark water, and others where the edges blur into something cosmic and otherworldly. Eulogies and laments thread through the record, yet it never collapses under its own weight.

Sykes once described her vision for the sessions as playing “as if the edge of a butterfly wing was brushing against your cheek in the dark, while holding a small child.” You can feel that tenderness in every drumbeat, in every reverent chord change. There’s grace here, but it’s one that’s aware of a menacing undertone hiding beneath the surface of the collective psyche. You can hear it in the spaces and shadows between notes. The delay in releasing the album, Sykes suggests, turned out to be a blessing, allowing her to tap into a deeper reservoir of unease and ultimately strength.

The presence of Marissa Nadler only deepens the spell. Nadler’s exquisite contributions braid seamlessly with Sykes’s voice, the two finding each other like twin constellations in a vast universe. Their harmonies do not soar and then hover, suspended in a kind of sacred hush. Time has changed this band. They sound older, wearier, even more fragile. Yet that fragility may end up being the album’s secret superpower. It’s music for dark rooms and late hours. Listen with the lights low. Let it unfold slowly.