Like E.M. Forster, who began his novel Howards End with the words that introduce this review’s title, the Montclair, NJ-based indie rock band Pinegrove is concerned with building bridges and drawing through-lines. The group, fronted by 26 year-old Evan Stephens Hall, proclaims on its Bandcamp page to be “hard at work in the promotion of introspective partying!”— exclamation point and all. Lest you, dear reader, take this statement as yet another arch millennial ironism, look no further than the group’s truly masterful new LP Cardinal, their first for Boston’s Run For Cover imprint.

Cardinal begins and ends with the theme of friendship and a resolution towards self-improvement. In the twangy opener “Old Friends,” Hall sings about the virtues of a support system: “I should call my parents when I think of them,” he admits. “I should tell my friends when I love them.” Later, on the closing track “New Friends,” his tone is more urgent but no less sincere: “I resolve to make new friends,” he declares. The bulk of Cardinal deals with the passage between these two states, the liminal zone between old friends and new. It’s an album that documents a striving against isolation, and it ends up portraying this struggle as an act of heroic ambition.

Cardinal is not Pinegrove’s first foray into the theme of connection.

The ampersand symbol has featured heavily in their imagery, appearing on the cover of their 2013 & EP as well as on their t-shirts and buttons. Similarly, last year’s Everything So Far compilation felt as much like a sincere demonstration of their full discography’s coherence as it did a marketing strategy corresponding to their then-recent label signing. Cardinal features three of the earlier songs from that album, including a re-recorded version of “Size of the Moon,” but each is appropriately re-contextualized—Cardinal, not Everything So Far, is the album that these songs were meant to appear on.

Hall’s connective attempts are fraught, threatened by those essential and banal vectors of human experience: space and time. These songs bear the indelible hallmarks of a life on the road, a kind of inborn highway transience. “Visiting” exemplifies this trait. Halfway through, the heartland-rock chug breaks down into a low-tempo banjo lilt, only to slowly draw itself together again, building up the momentum needed to careen forth on the ceaseless journey, the mythic

Tour. “City to city!” bellows Hall, as if urging on a transcontinental locomotive, “Montclair and elsewhere!” In other places, language itself fails to satisfy the connective urge.

This failure of language inspires some of the album’s emotional peaks— the vaulting crescendo of “Aphasia” especially, with its pinched falsetto and threat of self-erasure. But the album’s greatest pathos comes from the moments in which all the ingredients for connection seem to be in place, and yet connection remains elusive. This is evident in “Waveform,” a twist on the tear-in-your-beer country ballad in which Hall’s speaker idles on a symbolic threshold: “In a little while I’ll go,” he sings, “Unless you might want to hang a while. Then I won’t.” Hall taps into a familiar, perhaps universal feeling of ambivalence in the face of romantic uncertainty, but his inimitable voice—a high, versatile croon with a hint of adopted Midwestern drawl— elevates this sentiment out of the valley of cliché.

“Size of the Moon,” the album’s longest and penultimate song, follows a similar tack. Its subject matter is the classic fair of gritty realism: two people in a room, drinks, and the miasmic return of good memories soured by context. Like much of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, its lyrics comprise one side of a dialogue: the listener hears the speaker’s questions and confessions, but the presence of another, unheard character is implied throughout. This is the album’s canniest lyrical move—we feel implicated in the speaker’s urge to connect with his addressee, likely a former lover.

After Hall sheepishly asks the addressee to dance or simply talk, we feel the sting of silent, implicit rejection. As his remarks become more unhinged, ultimately tending towards a suicidal fantasy, we yearn to hear a voice call out from the other side—we, too, feel the speaker’s connective urge, even as he spirals into chaos. The arrangement expertly mirrors this rise of intensity; new layers of guitars and vocal harmonies bolster each successive refrain, all of which give way to a scorched-earth hum of feedback and plinking banjos at the end. This plaintive, ruminative lull brings the album full circle: the chiming guitars of “New Friends” begin, signaling the new connection that the song’s title implies. In this atmosphere of rebirth, Cardinal shines in its full splendor. Perhaps “Phoenix” would have been a better title—but then again, no.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I know the members of the band Pinegrove personally, if only a little. The four members of their current touring lineup slept in my apartment last weekend after supporting my band’s album release event at Toad’s. After the show, we grabbed some late night falafel at Mamoun’s and talked about art and literature. By the next morning, I felt as though I had known Hall for years, but most of this familiarity came from the fact I had been listening to Cardinal all week. This is perhaps the album’s greatest selling point, and its ironic outcome: in its spirited internal quest to connect, Cardinal stretches beyond itself. It reaches out to you.

Maybe this was the intention all along. If so, the song “Cadmium” might provide a clue. Its title, a slowly building highlight that appears early in the album, refers to I Send You This Cadmium Red, a book of correspondence between the artists John Berger and John Christie. Over the course of the project that the book documents, the two artists would send each other swatches of paint, drawings, and brief notes, each of which related to the theme of color. The result is an epistolary rainbow, a collection of touching gestures that together tend towards something grand, a collaborative kaleidoscope. On the whole, Cardinal is a similar collection of gestures; it lays its palette bare and invites —sometimes urgently, but always with grace—the fertile spirit of collaboration.