The Head and the Heart’s third album, Signs of Light, finds this indie-folk collective one member down. Following the tour for 2013’s Let’s Be Still and recording the first tracks for Signs of Light, guitarist and singer-songwriter Josiah Johnson told his band members that he needed to take a leave of absence. It seemed inexplicable, mainly because this was the outfit that seemed “meant to be,” defying odds, logic and geographic impossibility—all musical transplants who showed up at the same Ballard, Wash., pub on an open mic night in the summer of 2009 and realized they should form a band. Even the bartender, Chris Zasche, who had never played bass before, saw the musical inevitability and asked to join as the bassist. With Johnson gone, does that make them headless? Perhaps. But heartless? Never. In fact, the 13 songs on this album tremble with vulnerability, emotion, discovery and the kind of hard-won wisdom that they only hinted at in their first two albums. Where their last offering was dark with apprehension, Signs of Light throws open the shutters and reveals a new dawn for this group of dreamers, misfits and musical resettlers who all had to step up their game to fill in the psychic and musical void that Johnson left behind. And, in doing so, they outdid their earlier high-water marks, from Charity Rose Thielen’s “Library Magic, a (very) thinly veiled recap of what the last year was for The Head and the Heart, as things were unraveling, to Jonathan Russell’s anthemic “All We Ever Knew,” which out-Mumfords the Mumfords.