There’s something uniquely captivating about naming an album after a cemetery. Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery—with its winding paths and sculptural monuments—serves as both metaphor and landscape for The Ophelias‘ fourth album, a collection where ghosts of relationships past are summoned not for exorcism but for conversation.
Four years removed from their last release, Crocus, the Cincinnati-formed quartet returns with a record that feels less like resurrection and more like communion. Lead singer Spencer Peppet describes experiencing a strange period where figures from her past materialized in dreams that felt uncannily real: “They feel like having real conversations, except the person on the other side didn’t experience it,” she said. “It’s just me, left with this sense that I have more to say.”
What emerges across these thirteen tracks is a nuanced dialogue with memory, where the Cincinnati cemetery becomes a fitting namesake—a place where things are laid to rest but not forgotten, perpetually visible just beneath the surface.
The sound palette crafted here marks a notable evolution. For the first time, The Ophelias collaborated with Julien Baker as producer, who brings her characteristic emotional intelligence to the process. Baker’s influence is immediately apparent in the textured guitar sounds, where her pedalboard transforms Peppet’s playing into rich washes of colour rather than distinct lead lines. This atmospheric approach creates a cinematic quality the band aptly calls “movie music,” drawing partial inspiration from bassist Jo Shaffer’s experience making horror films.
Violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes emerges as a crucial voice throughout, her intricate countermelodies weaving through and responding to Peppet’s vocals like a spectral interlocutor. Meanwhile, Shaffer explores the upper register of the bass, sometimes playing multiple notes simultaneously, creating harmonics that blur the typical boundaries between bass and guitar. The foundational rhythms, meanwhile, showcase drummer Mic Adams’ complex relationship with identity and expression—his first album after coming out as transgender brings a fascinating push-pull to the kit, from the urgent breakbeats on “Say To You” to the gentle shuffle of “Parade.”
What distinguishes Spring Grove from countless other indie rock explorations of past relationships is Peppet’s insistence that there are “zero songs about breakups” here. Instead, the album navigates the messier, more interesting terrain of platonic relationships, power dynamics, and the fluidity of personhood itself. On “Parade,” a waltz-like rhythm underpins Peppet’s examination of female friendship and the distance between how we wish to be treated and how we are. “Salome” borrows biblical imagery to process involvement with an older man, demanding his “head on a platter” with teeth-clenching intensity.
The band’s composition has evolved alongside their sound. Once described reductively as an “all-girl band,” The Ophelias now include two trans members and one queer member, collectively exploring what it means to move through the world in relation to womanhood, whether embracing, redefining, or moving beyond that identity altogether.
Lead single “Cumulonimbus” exemplifies the album’s approach to reconciling with the past. “The things that I didn’t say are always going to hang above you like a cumulonimbus,” Peppet sings, using natural imagery as emotional shorthand—one of many instances where the external world mirrors interior landscapes. Similar imagery appears in the atmospheric folk tale “Vulture Tree,” where carrion birds become a metaphor for the necessary process of picking through painful memories to eventually heal.
Throughout Spring Grove, bodily imagery recurs with visceral frankness. On the haunting “Forcefed,” Peppet sings, “I’m eating my organs and I will let them sustain me.” This heightened awareness of physicality connects to Peppet’s diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder around the album’s conception, creating what she describes as “a hyper-awareness of the body, a sense of removal where I could see myself from outside.”
This dissociative quality gives many songs a dreamlike remove, allowing Peppet to observe herself and her relationships from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Mirrors and reflections appear frequently as both literal images and metaphorical devices—tools for looking inward and for seeing beyond present limitations.
By the album’s conclusion with “Shapes,” Peppet seems to arrive at a place of acceptance. “I’ll try my best to let things pass just as it is,” she sings as drums build and then recede like waves. The final image—”a reflection in the water / I am rippling forever”—suggests ongoing transformation rather than finality, a fitting conclusion for an album that treats identity as perpetually in flux.
What makes Spring Grove memorable, though, isn’t just its sonic adventurousness or lyrical depth, but the way it transforms hauntings into healing. These songs function as proper burials for relationships and versions of self that needed to be laid to rest—not to forget them, but to give them their proper place in memory’s landscape. Like its cemetery namesake, the album creates a space where the past remains visible but no longer painful, where ghosts can be acknowledged without letting them possess the present.
The Ophelias have crafted a record that treats complexity as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, that finds beauty in unresolved emotions, and that embraces the messiness of becoming.
Spring Grove is out now via Get Better Records.
The Ophelias play Casa Del Popolo on May 13.
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