With The National Parks, the Utah indie-folk group of the same name enters its most stripped-back and intimate era yet. Released August 28, 2026, the 10-song, 32-minute album is the first recorded entirely by the husband-and-wife duo Brady Parks and Megan Taylor Parks following the departure of founding members Sydney Macfarlane and Cam Brannelly. That change could have dramatically altered the band’s identity, but rather than attempting to recreate the expansive arrangements of earlier records, the Parks lean into what is most natural to them: acoustic guitars, fiddle, warm harmonies and the communal lift of voices singing together.
The result feels like a deliberate return to the qualities that have always worked best in The National Parks’ music. Earlier records occasionally pushed their folk-pop toward glossy, arena-sized production, while The National Parks finds considerably more charm in simplicity. “Sure Thing” gets the album moving with an easy, buoyant rhythm, while “Tryin’,” “Butterfly” and “Still the River Flows” settle into a relaxed acoustic groove. There is still plenty of the band’s familiar optimism and pop instinct, but the production gives the songs room to breathe. It is folk music designed for open-air listening rather than spectacle—music that sounds equally at home on a long drive, a summer evening or around a campfire.
That intimacy makes the album’s personal songs especially effective. “Honeybee,” the album’s shortest and perhaps most immediately affecting track, was actually the first song written for the record and nearly didn’t make the final cut. The couple ultimately kept it after their young children repeatedly asked to hear it in the car. That family connection comes through without requiring the song to overstate its sentiment, and its subsequent rise to become one of the band’s most-streamed current songs suggests the feeling translates beyond the Parks’ own household. Elsewhere, “Bluebird,” “Starlight” and “Us Against the World” continue the group’s longstanding fascination with love, nature and the passage of time, but the smaller-scale arrangements make those themes feel less like broad inspirational statements and more like observations shared between two people.
What ultimately distinguishes The National Parks is how convincingly the Parks turn a major lineup change into an opportunity to reconsider how the band makes music. They wrote and produced the album together, working in a backyard studio while their children were asleep, and that homemade setting is reflected in the record’s organic character. There are moments when the reduced instrumentation makes the songs feel somewhat less dynamic than the band’s biggest earlier productions, but that restraint is also the album’s defining strength. After more than a decade of making increasingly polished folk-pop, The National Parks have come back around to something simpler and more human. The National Parks isn’t a reinvention so much as a reset—and a reminder that sometimes a band finds its next chapter by getting closer to where it started. – Jason Felton