Lower Dens have broken up.

“It’s time for me and Nate [Nelson] to say goodbye to Lower Dens,” the band’s leader J Hunter wrote in a post on his new website. “We’re proud of what we’ve done, and very lucky to have had so many people supporting us. Spiritually and physically, we, like, can not participate in the music industry any longer. We’re also old, enjoy being with our families, and have other goals in mind.”

Lower Dens got their start in 2010 after Hunter had been making solo songs for a few years, putting out music on Devendra Banhart’s label. Their debut album, Twin-Hand Movement came out that year, followed by Nootropics in 2012. In 2015, they released their third album Escape From Evil, and in 2019 they released their fourth (and, as it turns out, final) album The Competition.

“My plans for the immediate future involve writing about change, and working to facilitate change,” Hunter wrote in the post. [nerd alert] Lower Den’s ‘thematic arc,’ a conceptual framework that I used to help write our albums, was about radical, equitable transformation of society. It’s what I really care about, which is why I was trying to write music about it in this rock band.”

In his post, Hunter also says that he was recently diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and has been struggling with cervical spinal stenosis.

“Thank you for caring about our band. Thank you to everyone who brought us or came with on tour. I’ve never felt alive as I did on stage,” Hunter continued. “What an incredible fucking privilege.”

You can read the full post here.