“It’s a funny thing, when you feel like you are changing as a person and you sometimes feel unfamiliar to yourself,” says Peter Silberman, The Antlers’ frontman and primary lyricist, about his headspace while working on his band’s fifth full-length album, Familiars. “You start noticing things about yourself that have been consistent throughout time—or maybe traced in your personality—that disappear for a little while and come back to you later in life.”

In their infancy, The Antlers were technically a nom de plume for Silberman, who established the group’s tone and vision with Uprooted and In the Attic of the Universe. During their adolescent years, on the band’s 2009 coming-out party Hospice and 2011’s Burst Apart, the project grew to include Darby Cicci and Michael Lerner and now, with Familiars, The Antlers have fully matured into adulthood.

Perhaps more than their efforts, each of The Antlers’ studio albums documents a distinct moment in the group’s creative evolution. They have each also left a personal fingerprint, serving as benchmarks in the life of the Brooklyn indie outfit and, more specifically, Silberman’s struggles. The 28-year-old frontman has never been one to shy away from difficult topics: Hospice tells the gut-wrenching story of an abusive relationship through settings that include, among others, a children’s cancer ward. It’s not exactly easy-listening. Still, five albums in and with praise coming from all directions, Silberman continues to search on Familiars.

“This whole Antlers trip has been interesting from an identity standpoint,” Silberman reflects. “I think getting onstage in front of a lot of people and releasing music publicly, especially music that’s pulled from a personal place, definitely can mess with your sense of identity.”

In order to get into the right headspace to create The Antlers’ new album, which he wrote over the course of a year and a half, the frontman spent time reconnecting with a familiar source—himself.

“I found myself growing and changing a lot,” Silberman says. “I started to think of it as a relationship with yourself, if yourself is another person that you drift away from and back to. I wanted to embody that in the music and the lyrics.”

Musically, the group drew inspiration from George Harrison, but instead of simply absorbing The Beatles guitarist’s work, Silberman took a closer look at his life and overall ethos.

“I found his personality very interesting—his life,” Silberman explains. “The way he ventured into his spiritual pursuits—the way that took him on a different path in his life and that became a source of inspiration for him.”

Silberman was in a particularly hopeful place while working on Familiars—and he is grateful for that. “It was important to have that hope exist in this record, partly for my own sake,” he says. “I wanted something that could reinforce the positivity in myself singing these songs every night and not feel something that would bring me down, but something that would help me solidify some kind of a more positive outlook and attitude. I think it was also what I was hoping to put in the world.”

On a larger scale, that notion is admirable. The world, Silberman admits, feels pretty grim. Personally, though, this new batch of songs serves as a necessary counterpoint to his previous material, signaling growth.

“It’s like saying, ‘Man, I’m so much better than I used to be a few years ago.’ It’s easy to say if there is nothing to challenge that,” he adds. “[Familiars is] helping me revisit these old stories and recontextualize them within the frame of this [new] record.”

The band’s catalog is filled with songs that explore themes of loss, rejection, illness, loneliness and confusion, but the thoughts that Silberman conveys throughout Familiars find the singer near the light at the end of a dark tunnel. “Director,” for example—“You will hate who you are ‘til you overthrow who you’ve been”—shows that Silberman is invested in facing his past head-on in order to move forward.

“Sometimes, it can feel like kind of being imprisoned in the past,” he admits. “I tried to write about that in this new record to some extent. You can get stuck in the past when you continually return to it in your head. It is kind of this vicious cycle. I have been working a lot on being present and trying to be present in every way that I can.” He goes on to add, “Everyone has a relationship that they’ve [moved] past. I just happened to have mine embodied in songs.”

The Antlers are currently in the midst of an extensive tour that will take them through Europe during the month of October. After spending so much time looking inward while working on Familiars, The Antlers are particularly excited to share their new batch of songs with a live audience. “Music is a shared experience, especially for us at this point,” the frontman gushes. “If we just exist in our own world with it and don’t invite anyone else into it, it becomes very one-sided and unfulfilling.”