Shore

Pecknold began writing Shore in September 2018 and recorded it between September 2019 and September 2020 with engineer Beatriz Artola. It was made without the band's other members. Anti- announced it one day ahead and released it at 13:31 UTC on 22 September 2020, timed to the equinox. A 55-minute companion film of the same name, shot on Super-16mm by Kersti Jan Werdal, went up on YouTube at the same moment.

Recording started at Aaron Dessner's Long Pond studio near Hudson, where the horn quartet The Westerlies and drummer Joshua Jaeger took part. In Paris, Uwade Akhere, whom Pecknold found through a clip of her singing Mykonos, sang on Wading in Waist-High Water, Can I Believe You and Shore. Most of the record was cut at Electro-Vox in Los Angeles with Christopher Bear of Grizzly Bear on drums. Pecknold wrote the lyrics to fifteen songs in three to four weeks in June 2020, on drives into the Catskills. Recording continued at The Diamond Mine in Long Island City, where Homer Steinweiss played drums on four songs, and at Electric Lady.

Sunblind names musical heroes who have died, the chorus of Can I Believe You gathers roughly 400 to 500 voices from his Instagram followers, and Going-to-the-Sun Road ends with a verse in Portuguese sung by Tim Bernardes of O Terno, the first original Fleet Foxes song not written by Pecknold alone. Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman samples Brian Wilson counting from an a cappella take on The Pet Sounds Sessions. The cover photograph, Outlet, Bering Glacier, Alaska 1973, is by Hiroshi Hamaya. Metacritic scored the album 87 from 19 reviews, and Matthew Strauss's Pitchfork review of 23 September 2020 described it as warm and newly full of grace. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.