“The way things are going / It’s harder than you’ll ever know / To send you off now with a song,” Nils Edenloff of the Canadian folk rock outfit The Rural Alberta Advantage sings on their latest album, The Rise & The Fall, out this Friday on Paper Bag Records and Saddle Creek. The album, which adds seven songs to their last EP, The Rise, which came out last year, is a pandemic record, made over Zoom calls, online file sharing, and incubated in borrowed warehouse practices during the lockdown. Between the undue circumstances of a pandemic and Edenloff’s honest struggle to put pen to pad, we’re lucky to see this album of epic proportions, the fifth from their direction and a return to the original lineup.

With their grand sweeping instrumental compositions and their knack for emotionally charged choruses, they have something in common with Philadelphia’s The War On Drugs, and with Edenloff’s geographic specific lyrics, resonant tenor, and super folk guitar leanings, it’s as if The War On Drugs was fronted by The Tallest Man On Earth’s Kristian Mattson, two of modern rock’s biggest hitters today.

In a touch of synchronicity, there is even a song on this album called “10 Ft Tall.” “Somehow if you never wake up again / I won’t stay quiet / But the songs still cut through the void.” There are songs about living and surviving (“Real Life”), Canada’s early snows (“Late September Snow”) and the pull to travel (“Don’t Wake Up”), a lot of adult pondering. But many of the songs hit on Edenloff’s craft of songwriting. He said, regarding his writer’s block, that one of the inspirations for writing was testing out how AI would write songs in the style of RAA, and they weren’t impressed.

He’s still humble about the weight of creating meaningful songs and fronting a successful band. Like he sings in the album single, “Conductors,” “But I never thought that the little wires / Diminished volts in the heart / Well, us conductors got potential to still let you down.” In this all too human album, Edenloff and crew, bemoan the existential crises we all face, but also celebrate the alchemy of a group of friends getting together and creating something from nothing together.

At one of their recent shows, (they hopped back on the touring circuit as soon as they were able,) one person who came to attend their show said, “Your music makes me long for things I didn’t know I wanted.” While they share a DNA with the folk rock sweeping the world right now, in sound, they also share the magnanimous heart behind the world’s best music right now, too. “For what it’s worth, there is time to decide / Let’s keep crisscrossing this divide,” they sing towards the end of the album.

The album ends with a one-take recording, “FSHG,” a treat to listen to what they sound live, but the rest of the album is full of mind-blowing production, including Paul Banwatt’s intricate and electric drumming (particularly wowing on the song “Lullaby”). It’s an impressive album with a strong dose of humility, seen in the adding of “The Fall” to “The Rise.” Hopefully, with whatever challenges life throws at them, pandemics, writer’s block, and the like, they can continue to put out life-changing records like this one.

Order The Rise & The Fall HERE.