Recorded together as part of the same session, Ida’s two turn-of-the-century albums, Will You Find Me and The Braille Night, were the product of every independent band’s dream: record an album on the company’s dime and then release them on your own. Except that’s not exactly how it turned out for the NYC-based slowcore band; the band was dropped from Capitol Records without putting out a single release due to a regime change, leaving Ida without support but (eventually) left holding the rights to the master tapes for Will You Find Me, eventually released via Insound record label Tiger Style in 2000. The Braille Night was culled from those same tapes after the band realized they had enough good songs for a second release, and was published a year later.

Ida called bands like Low their contemporaries; in fact, you could think of Ida as Low with fewer experimental tendencies and more harmonization. The duelling vocals of husband-wife duo Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell are the band’s calling card, their harmonies casting a thousand-watt light across the often haunting folk landscapes that might otherwise feel forlorn and lonely. Whether this strategy agrees with you may depend on whether you like forlorn and lonely music or not; for those who prefer to live more fully in the darkness, like-minded folk artists like Tara Jane O’Neil might be more up your alley. But there’s a compelling case to be made for Ida’s tendency towards harmonization: it is, in a word, gorgeous. Where the formula might quickly grow tired in a different context—say, straightforward indie pop—the melancholy nature of some of the backing tracks adds just the right amount of bitterness.

After 2001, the band took some time to record a follow-up thanks to a litany of one-off releases and side projects; midwestern post-emo stalwarts Polyvinyl Records put out Heart Like a River in 2005, and word has it Ida’s preparing another album for release sometime in the next year or so. Or something like that.