Stay Gold

First Aid Kit’s harmonies had always sounded bigger than two voices, but Stay Gold is the album where the arrangements finally expand to meet them. Klara and Johanna Söderberg made their third record with producer Mike Mogis at ARC Studios in Omaha, opening the music beyond the deliberately limited palette of their earlier work. A 16-piece orchestra, arranged and orchestrated by Nathaniel Walcott, appears across the album, giving the sisters’ folk songwriting a sweep that can feel cinematic without sacrificing the closeness of the singing.

The title comes from Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and that idea of beauty being inseparable from impermanence runs through the record. First Aid Kit said the songs were more closely concerned with their own lives than before, circling the need to appreciate what exists while accepting that it cannot remain fixed. “My Silver Lining” captures that tension particularly well. Its strings push forward with almost western momentum, yet the lyric is preoccupied with uncertainty and the difficulty of knowing what comes next.

“Cedar Lane” is gentler and more reflective, giving the sisters’ interlocking voices space to do what they do best: make a melody feel both communal and intensely personal. The orchestration matters because it does not simply make everything larger. At times it provides motion, at others it adds ache or distance. That was a genuine shift in method. Previous First Aid Kit records had been made with the practical question of whether three people could reproduce the arrangements live; Stay Gold deliberately abandoned that restriction.

The result is not an escape from folk music so much as a widening of its frame. Pedal-steel colours, acoustic foundations and close harmony remain central, but they now coexist with strings and more elaborate production. What makes the album worth returning to is the balance between those elements. Its prettiness is never merely decorative, because the songs keep asking what happens when good things change, disappear or have to be left behind. Stay Gold glows, certainly, but it understands why the glow cannot last forever.