As The Head and the Heart toured behind their 2022 album, Every Shade of Blue, Jonathan Russell realized something needed to change inside the band he had cofounded a dozen years earlier: the entire songwriting process. Sure, they’d had Platinum singles, including “Honeybee” and “All We Ever Knew,” but the tandem of success and encroaching adulthood had forced sometimes-unspoken changes over the years. Russell, for instance, often took on lead songwriting duties, even bringing in outside collaborators to bolster his ideas. Their early band energy faded a bit, a slight disconnect forming between the songs and the members, even between one another.

Aperture—The Head and the Heart’s sixth album and their first since signing to Verve Forecast—is the affirming sound of their restart. After leading so much of the songwriting during the last decade, Russell ceded that role to everyone, shooing away siloed work for a highly collaborative approach where everyone hatched tunes together in a room or passed ideas between coasts. With every song fortified by the sense of beginning again, Aperture is The Head and the Heart’s most vital and poignant album. It is the best work they’ve ever done. Really, all of Aperture sounds like the work of a band reaching unimagined levels of camaraderie and mutual risk as one, at once. A spirited homage to honesty and love, “Jubilee” is like the sun suddenly bursting from the clouds. It bounces like a piece of pop-punk and arcs like a Springsteen classic. During “Beg Steal Borrow,” The Head and The Heart’s trademark harmonies conjure communal aspirations. And there may be no better summary of this fellow feeling than the mighty “Arrow,” a shout-along song about sometimes needing the space to roam and fail on your own and sometimes needing to be guided and helped by those around you. The Head and The Heart has finally found a way for its six members to find their own ideas and then build them, together, into something magnificent.