Balmorhea (pronounced bal-mə-ray) is a six-piece instrumental group from Austin, TX.

A decade-plus on the road, near-constant musical output, and shifting creative priorities caused the revered Austin duo, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Rob Lowe and Michael Muller, to soberly assess the band’s future. What, in the form of Balmorhea, was there left to say? And did they have the energy to say it?

Stranger, the group’s maximalist, genre-leaping full-length from 2012, and the HEIR singles, from 2014, had already seemed to trace the group’s farthest bounds. And, over the years, they’d worked with a roving cast of accomplished string and rhythm players to craft a glassy-eyed, sage-brushed, instrumental Americana that, while celebrated in The New Yorker, Pitchfork and The Atlantic, among myriad other press, and attracting the film, ad, and television worlds — Balmorhea’s “Bowsprit” incites trembling in the credits of the Sundance show Rectify — risked pigeonholing them for good.