Article Contributed by Gratefulweb
Published on 2026-07-19
Acclaimed chamber folk duo Cricket Blue have announced their second album, Sweet Animal, arriving September 18 via Bridge & Key Artist Collective. Alongside the announcement, Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith have shared a new double single, “Ella I” and “You,” two songs that anchor the album’s dual narrative perspectives.
Across 20 intricately arranged songs, Sweet Animal confronts mortality from opposite sides of the same question, holding space for Laura’s growing spiritual curiosity alongside Taylor’s secular reckoning with mortality’s finality.
“The whole album is about death, grief, love, and being embodied in the physical plane,” Laura says. “Sweet Animal is a reference to your own body being a sweet animal, and having a tenderness toward your own physicality.”
Structured as a cyclical work that returns to its own beginning, the album resists definitive conclusions about what lies beyond death, instead offering a compassionate exploration of uncertainty.
Inspired by Laura’s late grandmother, “Ella I” considers death’s constant proximity as both a comfort and a weight for the living, introducing an image of death as one-way glass before questioning whether the signs the narrator receives are real or imagined.
Its partner single, “You,” finds Taylor’s philosophically materialist narrator turning over the idea of open individualism—the notion that all beings are part of a single consciousness—alongside a kaleidoscope of unresolved interpersonal threads. The song closes on the question, “Does it happen to me when it happens to you?”
Featuring contributions from Goose drummer Cotter Ellis, Clogs bassoonist Rachael Elliott, Vermont Symphony Orchestra principal cellist John Dunlop and dozens of musicians drawn from the region’s classical, folk and experimental scenes, Sweet Animal balances chamber-scale intricacy with communal warmth.
The album will be supported by a Burlington release show with an orchestra, duo touring and visual content, including a fan-made animated video for “Landfills, Gardens, Nurseries.”
Production:
Arranged by Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith
Mixed, electronic production and additional arrangements by Christopher Hawthorn
Mastered by Rob Murray
All songs were written by Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith.
About Cricket Blue
Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith met as students at Middlebury College in Vermont, bonding as members of an a cappella group over shared touchstones such as Neutral Milk Hotel, Anaïs Mitchell, Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom.
After graduation, both settled in Burlington and gradually began collaborating on one another’s songs. Laura, a classically trained cellist, and Taylor, a jazz saxophonist, brought different musical backgrounds to a shared love of adventurous songwriting, unusual structures and close vocal harmony that coalesced into Cricket Blue.
Their 2019 debut, Serotinalia, earned national attention for its literary lyricism and distinctive harmonies, with NPR Music calling the duo “master storytellers” and The All Scene Eye praising a “new standard in fiction-folk.”
Cricket Blue was voted Vermont’s Best Folk Group in the 2019 Seven Daysie Awards. During the pandemic, the duo unexpectedly built an international cult following through reinterpretations of songs from Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall, which evolved into an annual sold-out live show.
Cricket Blue have performed at venues and festivals across the United States and Canada, and Laura has also appeared solo on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Album pre-save:
[INSERT ALBUM PRE-SAVE LINK]
Facebook: Cricket Blue will release Sweet Animal on September 18, a 20-song meditation on death, grief, love and the strange privilege of being here.
