“I’ve always felt a duty to create something out of nothing,” says Laura Hobson, songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of the Grand Rapids quintet Phabies. “Changing a grass lawn into a native ecosystem or playing three chords to create a song.” The band’s upcoming sophomore album, aptly titled The Curse of Caring, explores that inescapable instinct—to tend to, mend, nourish or transform—in the context of human relationships as well as humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

The album opens with the sweeping and orchestral “Blooms of April,” initially released in partnership with Brian Eno’s Earth/Percent, a non-profit committed to climate action. Hobson’s tight, syncopated strumming is buoyed by sleek violins, played by Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Dirty Projectors, Wet) as she beckons, Who’s gonna save us now? It’s a cataclysmic question that propels the record forward, careening listeners between affecting images of abandoned video stores and lemon trees. Hobson evokes due urgency—The end of the final scene / Where the sheep, they will be shorn, and the curtain remain torn / While the warnings go ignored by rich ears—resolute and raw in her depiction of environmental stakes. She continues the reckoning on “Green Cement”—Plastic grass, plastic lawn chair, plastic long after we’re here / and that’s one way to leave a legacy / Are we doing it right, are we doing it right? / Pave the kingdom for an endless supply. Throughout The Curse of Caring, there is grave and undeniable concern.

There is also, remarkably, hope. The songs of Phabies anticipate calamity in no uncertain terms, but they also explore what it means to ground oneself in the world as it crumbles. On “Tell Her,” in a braid of pristine vocal layers, Hobson asks—How do you make a person want to stay alive? It’s a striking question, charged with that compassion for which the album’s named. Hobson’s voice sounds as though it’s rising from the ruin—We’re all heading for disaster / Everything that will go wrong / Go on and tell her / Tell her you love her.

Over the course of writing the album, Hobson participated in several School of Song workshops, led by artists including Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief and Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie. Her reverent dedication to craft radiates through song structures that range from infectious and rollicking to exacting and propulsive, from sunny and dreamlike to wrenching and stark. Alongside Hobson, Andrew Deters (guitar), Joshua Holicki (drums), Max McKinnon (keys), and Garrett Stier (bass guitar, vocals) juxtapose lyrical severity with elegant instrumentation, cinematic at times, soothing at others, and always sophisticated. The album was mixed by Adrian Olsen (Foxygen, Fruit Bats), Jeremy Ferguson (Cage the Elephant, Be Your Own Pet) and Sean Sullivan (Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers), with engineers Matt Latchaw & Gusti Escalante, and mastered by Kim Rosen (Emmylou Harris, The Milk Carton Kids).

Hobson tracked the record at a DIY artist retreat with producer Jake Merritt at Sabbath Recording in Cincinnati. Merritt organized a variety of activities each day—interactive tasks intended to generate songwriting inspiration. On a mushroom identification hike one afternoon, Hobson overheard a woman on the trail remark, “These kids have too much city in ‘em these days.” The passing quip became the chorus of jubilant, surf-rock single “I Care for You,” a tongue-in-cheek inquiry into the dangers of surplus comfort—There’s too much city in you now / Ain’t gonna lose ya to the crowd / I care for you.

That very sentiment, however playful, speaks to Phabies’ ethos, to their coping method for the volatile modern world. As on the tenderly lilting title track—So put on your red dress now / I want to see you live life out loud—the band neither deny nor surrender to doom. Rather, they confront it, looking for light in the dark, asking listeners to do the same. Is it a disease to have these dreams / Or is it the curse of caring?