Moving into their fourth decade as a band, the group has embraced their longevity. Antietam has been a life’s work and driving force for bandleader Tara Key, her husband and collaborator Tim Harris, and drummer Josh Madell; it is the center of Key’s creative life. Intimations of Immortality is a record about pursuing that creative side with passion and honesty in the face of life’s obstacles and workaday trials. Key’s unrelenting songs push the theory of the unbending power of creativity, friendship, and perseverance, delivering a joyful and emotional set of triumphant rock and roll.

More than any album in their discography, IOI displays the band’s usual powerful heaviness, but offers melodies enriched with some unexpected instrumentation (banjo, mandolin, sax, piano). Textures of Neil Young and the 13th Floor Elevators are audible in the mix.

It’s that friendship and perseverance that are at the core of the creativity of IOI. While Antietam maintains its bruising power trio status, led by Key’s Les Paul guitar attacks, this album is propelled to new heights by creative collaborators including longtime friends Yo La Tengo—James McNew mixed the album with Tara, and Ira Kaplan guests on piano. Many others from Antietam’s close-knit NYC scene drop in as well, including Sue Garner (The Shams, Run On) on vocals; Katie Gentile (Special Pillow, Mad Scene) on violin; The Scene Is Now’s Cheryl Kingan (saxes) and Steven Levi (cornet) chime in throughout; and Steve Cooley, a bluegrass legend from Tara and Tim’s original hometown of Louisville, KY, joins on mandolin and guitar.

IOI is a road map of the terrain of a life, a clear-eyed historic survey of Key’s 60 years on this planet, her band’s long journey, and the broader state of the union. Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris’s journey began in the Louisville punk scene of the late 1970s. Key and Harris relocated to NYC in the early ’80s, formed Antietam, and signed to the legendary Homestead Records. Josh Madell joined up in 1990 (and he founded NYC’s beloved Other Music record shop in ’95), heralding a prolific period for both Antietam and Tara Key’s solo releases. They delivered a trifecta of albums in the new millennium on Chicago’s recently shuttered Carrot Top Records (Victory Park—2004, Opus Mixtum—2008, Tenth Life—2011). The band’s tenacity is unwavering. Antietam insists on a seat at the table of rock and roll, beating assumptions about what it means to remain creative and vital against the odds.

In 2011, Greil Marcus, reviewing Tenth Life, described Antietam as “undefeated.” The band embraces that descriptor. While the name Antietam is derived from possibly the most pivotal day in American history (the turning point in the Civil War, the trigger for the Emancipation Proclamation, the bloodiest day in the nation’s history), a lifetime on the road has proved that no one will ever really know how to pronounce it, and most people have no idea what it is. The band’s tenth album, Intimations of Immortality, smiles in the face of that small indignity, and turns up the volume.