Ryan and Sara met Don at a show at Melvin's, a bar on St. Claude in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans. Ryan and Sara had just begun writing and recording songs together on an old 4-track with a mic hanging from the blade of a ceiling fan in the middle of that stifling sweaty summer, but they would soon part ways and leave New Orleans. Over the next couple of years they relocated to Providence together and later settled in Brooklyn where Don had also settled after Katrina.

Life of Love is the first collection of songs Callers wrote and recorded exclusively in New York as a three-piece. Naturally the band's sound grew in volume in response to the volume of the city; however, they held on to what makes them so consistently affecting: their raw spartan style, anchored by Sara's sensually tough vocals, and Ryan and Don's Southern-honed chops as multi-instrumentalists.

The album started with the band's cover of Wire's "Heartbeat", and the idea of creating something simple and cathartic. Using borrowed amps and mics, in bedrooms and in studios, and by the grace of their good friends, Callers recorded Life of Love in intense spurts over the course of a year. Unlike the experimental ballads on their debut Fortune, the new songs pulse with gritty urgency, colored by the sounds of damaged gear and the earnest spirit of a middle-school gospel choir. The result is an album stripped to the core, an expression of the inexpressible space between us and the places we inhabit and the people we share those places with.

“The bulk of the last decade brought Baltimore’s hyper-color acts—the dance epics of Dan Deacon and the guitar spirals of Ecstatic Sunshine and Ponytail, or even the expatriate pop exuberance of Animal Collective—to the central streams of indie rock. Maybe it’s time to pull the shades: Maryland sextet Secret Mountains is a slow, subdued wonder, shaped by serpentine guitar lines that sigh and moan and busy drumming that sidles into the beat and shuffles around it. The surface is supplied by Kelly Laughlin, a singer whose muted alto seems wounded but resilient, like an autumn sun breaking through early morning clouds. This band is bound for bigger rooms.” Grayson Currin (Indyweek.com)