The making of Fleet Foxes’ second album was fraught, due in no small part to the success of their first. Robin Pecknold and co. wondered how to trust their instincts without leaning on formula, and fretted about the reception that awaited their new music. These worries form a backdrop for Helplessness Blues, the unmistakable work of uneasy hearts. Starting with the scene-setting intonation that opens the record (“So now I am older”), Pecknold’s melancholy tenor heralded a decade of discourse about millennial anxiety.

He paints an indelible portrait of fading young-adulthood—diverging from the path set by parents, searching for place and purpose, falling out of relationships that have dried up. Above all, Pecknold questions his ability—and will—to be anything other than, as he describes it on the title track, “a functioning cog in some great machinery.” These complicated fears offer a foil to the swollen sound that envelopes them. Fleet Foxes’ maximalist folk, with harmonies stacked high as mountains and reverb that could fill caverns, makes feeling small seem epic.