Speaking things into existence is a powerful tool, even if it’s just a casual comment to then-strangers on your first day at college orientation. It might initially seem insignificant, but when that comment becomes real years later, it feels like time folding in on itself – your future self catching up with your past self and vice versa. That’s the kind of spiritual déjà vu that comes to mind when I speak to Racing Mount Pleasant members Connor Hoyt, Kaysen Chown, Sam DuBose, and Sam Uribe about how their big-band folk rock project came together.

The four, Zooming in from the attic of the house they share in Detroit, make up more than half the band. The rest — Casey Cheatham, Callum Roberts, and Tyler Thenstedt — are scattered between Ann Arbor and Chicago.

Racing Mount Pleasant don’t have a dramatic origin story. But the slow ease with which the band was built over the years, starting around 2020, is quietly remarkable. They were all students at the University of Michigan. Hoyt, Roberts, and DuBose met within the first hour of orientation.

“The first thing, I said — we were talking like what do you want to do or whatever — I was like, ‘Oh, I kind of would think it’d be cool to be in a band like Arcade Fire with a lot of people and horns and stuff. I guess I went into it already wanting this, which I’m very happy to have gotten,” DuBose explains, making it sound like a throwaway comment-turned-fortune overshadowed by the chaos of starting college.

It would be years before Kingfisher, the band’s early incarnation, even began. With Chown joining in 2022, the final lineup was locked in. Uribe notes that their story might not be the juiciest: “What we want to present ourselves as, and what it has always been, is a group of friends that came together through similar musical and lifestyle similarities. But however corny and easy of a story that is, that is what happened. We are just close, and play music together.”

“The band formed under a very low pressure,” Hoyt adds. “‘Let’s just do this to have fun while we were living together.’ Our first few shows were at our house as a very low-key kind of thing. But even some of the songs from those shows are going to be coming out on our most recent album.”

Before Chown was asked to be in the band, she’d attended one of those early basement shows. “I got a chance to be the audience member and experience that energy in the room and the intimacy that was conveyed through the music,” she says. “I had not really encountered that in a lot of other bands from our college town or bands that are my age.”

About seven months after Chown joined Kingfisher, their debut album Grip Your Fist, I’m Heaven Bound was released. That first album is like 2010s Andrew Bird went on a transcendental hike with Bon Iver’s 22, A Million — there’s folk-driven intricacies, sharp-left-turn guitar distortion, and a collision of trip-hop and orchestral sounds. By January 2023, they were back in the studio recording.

They didn’t have a label at the time, but they didn’t want to lose momentum. Uribe explains, of their new album, that they’d “record it basically wherever we could have access to, however we could — it was like an amalgamation of different studios, different home recording spaces, jumping around. Now, we had this attic when we moved here, to record a bunch of stuff here, but it was over a long period of time.”

Their second album together — Racing Mount Pleasant, out today — was recorded over the past three years in a variety of spaces. “Probably over six,” Chown says. She recalls a special moment where she’d recorded several violin, viola, and cello parts for “34th Floor” at a church sanctuary that Uribe was living at, although she doesn’t quite exactly remember how that came to be. “He was like a steward of the church?” she says, smiling a bit confused.

“It was a weird situation,” Uribe says. [All four start laughing.] “I didn’t give context. Basically, I had a free rent living situation as a student, because they gave rooms to students. So I had keys to this church. I’m not religious, but I lived in this room next to a church that I had access to, which is pretty funny.”

“34th Floor” is a swelling instrumental outlier — a breath-gathering moment before the album reaches its transcendent end. It’s no surprise that, when I ask if they have any future desires as a band, Chown mentions “this little goal of writing music, like an original soundtrack for a film.” It’s easy to imagine Racing Mount Pleasant building emotive backgrounds for the silver screen — their music already feels built for it.

Racing Mount Pleasant’s writing process is like a long exposure pinhole camera. “We definitely weren’t consciously writing this album for a long time,” DuBose says. “This album doesn’t really feel like we tried to purposely try something new than we did the first one. It just is what naturally happened with all the songs.”

He clarifies that it’s not like certain songs here didn’t make the cut for that first album, they just hadn’t been recorded. To build songs with seven people, they rely on repetition. “We’ll repeat the same section over and over and over and over and over again infinite times until, usually what happens is, someone plays something that will lead into the next thing.” Uribe adds: “We trust our ears.”

The songs on Racing Mount Pleasant are cinematic and layered, creating a miniverse where melodies, lyrics, and song titles call back to one another. It’s not entirely a concept record, and the band doesn’t go into explicit detail in regards to album narrative. But these instruments are conversational with each other, and listening to RMP feels like eavesdropping on someone’s past. “Memory is a big part of it or looking back on the last six years, essentially,” admits DuBose, the band’s lyricist.

These songs switch tenses. They live in a newly furnished apartment; they look back on a consequential November; they imagine what might happen if forehead kisses that long to be so much more are allowed to evolve. The compositions around these twinkling moments triumphantly build towards something — desperation, possibility, dread — rewarding you with every relinquished second. Racing Mount Pleasant lingers in the moment, crafting a soundtrack for the beauty of our time-traveling minds. “Nobody wanted to be choked by time/ How lucky I am to be a piece of your life,” goes one line on “Your New Place.”

Part of Racing Mount Pleasant’s magic lies in how effortlessly their music collapses space and time. It’s enchanting the way memory latches onto a physical place — like walking into your childhood home or an old hangout and feeling the past flood in. These songs move like memory: animated, all-encompassing, unpredictable. There are small hideaways of staccato string plucks and gliding horns and daydreaming strings; waltzing melancholic builds (“Emily”) and tender, delicate compositions that recall early Bon Iver (“Heavy Red,” “You Pt. 2”); sacred moments where strings and piano weep together (“Seminary”). The new album is richly bittersweet – the same way memories balance the grief of lost time and the gratitude of being able to keep track of it.

“The idea of memory playing a part in this record, to me, is very important,” Uribe reflects. “Some songs are based in the present and some songs are based in the past, and how self-referential some of the songs are both through like melodies of the horns and the lyrics themselves. It’s this cycle of memory.”

This is striking, given that their new name change is sort of a purposeful misremembering. Nearly every state has a place called Mount Pleasant. If you Google “Mount Pleasant” and any state, a map will most likely pop up. (I’ve already done it for Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Montana, Vermont, and Georgia.) But, Chown explains, that the inspiration for their name isn’t for a specific place, but an exit off the highway on the way to Chicago. “Racine Mount Pleasant,” it reads.

The moniker shift came about as a practicality. “It’s not exactly a full rebrand or anything.” Chown adds, “[It’s] like a Microphones to Mount Eerie type of situation.” Their new official name came from a song title — one that wasn’t even written until near the end of the album process. Fittingly, only when that track took shape did the rest of the record began to make sense. Racing Mount Pleasant might have ostensibly come out of nowhere in the last few months, but this crew has been carefully honing their vision. It’s just now that everything is coming into focus.

That momentum that fueled their two vibrant albums hasn’t burned out. At first hesitant to share the news, but nonetheless excited, they’re already dipping their toes into another project. “We have like five new songs. It’s awesome,” Chown laughs. But whatever the end result, it won’t be as tumultuously put together the way RMP was. By the time this interview is published, the crew hopes that all seven members will be moved out to Chicago. Uribe, DuBose, and Hoyt will continue to be roommates. Racing Mount Pleasant is a nearly six-year-old scrap book, but Racing Mount Pleasant seem eager to make new memories for them to look back on.

Racing Mount Pleasant is out now via R&R.