Led by singer-songwriter Emma Hardyman, the Provo, Utah-based avant-folk act made waves last year, winning the 2023 edition of NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with a stirring submission of the explosive, ornately layered song “wonder eye.”

On Dear Divine (out now via Joyful Hoise Records), Hardyman set out to write a romantic album about her newlywed husband Nathan, but the universe had other plans. After Nathan’s mother tragically passed away—a loss made more difficult by the fact that he had just informed her of his plans to exit the church—Hardyman recalibrated her vision and started work on a love-as-grief, grief-as-love album titled Dear Divine. Written after her own complicated departure from the Mormon Church, Dear Divine is Little Moon’s wide-eyed, intensely personal embrace of a whole new world. It is a vast, dense sonic tapestry of soaring multi-octave vocals over rich, future-baroque arrangements, mimicking the grandiosity and delicate ebbs and flows of nature, and the radical love and self-care that Hardyman seeks wherever she goes.