MASSACHUSETTS indie-folk band Darlingside will play The Crescent Community Venue in York on June 30 on their third trip to Britain.

The Boston quartet became the surprise hit of last summer's Cambridge Folk Festival in their UK debut appearance. After their performance on Stage 2, they stepped in for an absent headliner on Stage 1, and such was their impact that their busking spot and album-signing session the next day turned into major events.

The on-site merchandise stall quickly ran out of Darlingside CDs and vinyl and their subsequent run of British dates sold out in a flash. An equally well-received tour in January and February peaked with performances at the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow and a packed Lexington in London.

They accompanied that tour with the re-release of Bird Say, an album marked by literary, erudite and witty lyrics on such stand-out tracks as White Horses, Harrison Ford and the title number.

Frequently compared with The Byrds, Fleet Foxes, Simon & Garfunkel and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Darlingside’s adventurous sonic landscape, harmony vocal interplay and wry lyricism on Birds Say defy easy categorisation.

When bass player Dave Senft, guitarist and banjo player Don Mitchell, classical violinist and folk mandolinist Auyon Mukharji and cellist and guitar picker Harris Paseltiner gather around a single microphone and let their voices loose, they "splash their melodies with a sunny melancholy that brings their lyrics to vibrant life".

Subtle musical shadings take cues from folk, chamber pop, bluegrass, classical music and indie rock, while harmonies are complemented by the harmonium, banjo, 12-string electric guitar, Wurlitzer, auto-chord organ and grand piano. Each member sings lead and who plays what can shift from song to song.

Friends for ten years, Darlingside had met as students at Williams College in Boston and began writing and singing together. The songs that make up Birds Say were assembled over the past three years in their kitchens and living rooms, on cabin retreats, and while visiting each other’s childhood homes.

They recorded the tracks at Dimension Sound Studios in Boston with engineer and co-producer Dan Cardinal during the city’s snowiest month in history, the streets empty due to travel bans. Amid unexpected soundscapes, the songs remain familiar, looking backward and forward at the same time.

The naming of the band reflects the humour, wordplay and banter the four close friends share on and off stage “Pesticide is used to kill pests. Fratricide is when you kill your brother,” says Darlingside’s Dave Senft. “A former teacher of ours used to say ‘kill your darlings', which is to say, if you fall in love with something you’ve written you should cross it out. We like that idea and we thought a good name for it might be ‘darlingcide’, but we changed the ‘c’ to an ‘s’ because we’re not super into death.”