Sometimes you have to step back to move forward. Though much of The Big Moon’s third record is, at root, concerned with progression into a new phase of adulthood, its creative breakthroughs were set in motion by a moment of conscious retreat. Hurriedly reconvened in early 2021, the band set about belatedly capitalizing on the pandemic-throttled momentum of second album Walking Like We Do. Recording and mixing was conducted at a sprint, against the looming deadline of pregnant frontwoman and chief songwriter Juliette Jackson’s impending due date. And then, when the London-forged quartet listened back to the studiously produced, efficiently made new tracks, they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was…off. Hitting pause in a number of ways—drummer Fern Ford built a home studio in her flat; Jackson gave birth to her son and wrote new songs inspired by the wakeful love tsunami of those early weeks—they let life guide the process, and lead them to the next phase. The end result is Here Is Everything: a scintillating, courageous ode to early motherhood, shot through with both earworming, melodic thrust and emotional complexity, that fires their signature revivalist indie off into a new stratosphere of both ambition and impact. Fittingly, lots of the magic of these tracks resides in their radical honesty about lurching shifts in both private and public worlds. “Sucker Punch” sets bleak thwartedness and violent imagery to a gothic, prairie swing; “Satellites”—built with a spare, ragged demo recording made when Jackson was struggling with hellish morning sickness—is all mournful synths, nagging doubt, and wryly observed pensiveness (“I can almost hear the drawbridge coming up on my independence”). As depicted in the cover image of a heavily pregnant, defiantly poised Jackson, these are songs consciously perched on the precipice between doubt and confidence, youth and adulthood, boundless joy and debilitating anguish. However, if nothing else, these 11 tracks cement The Big Moon’s ability to render intimate, intensely human thoughts at skyscraping scale. “2 Lines” (named for the tiny cataclysm of a positive pregnancy test) is a driving riot of strummed guitar and swelling, scream-along harmonies. “Trouble” and “Magic” have an angular, festival-ready swing and reframed lyrical insouciance. And then there is “Wide Eyes”: a tear-streaked slow build of walloping, wee-hours emotion and the post-Britpop anthem that you didn’t know you needed.