Local band Mumford’s newest album, “Immediate Family,” is being released on Sunday, Dec. 8. A Maximum Ames record cannot properly be released without an album release show. Mumford’s album release show for Immediate Family will be released at the Space for Ames at 6 p.m., with special guests Gloom Balloon and Holly and the Night Owls. Price of admission is $5 or free if you buy the album at the show.

Immediate Family is a departure from Mumford’s previous album, Triple Trinities, which was driven by powerful horn-squealing melodies and punchy choruses. Instead, Mumford’s has taken a softer approach, relying more on lyrical content to get the point across.

“The album itself just kind of is that way,” said Nate Logsdon, principle songwriter and singer for Mumford’s. “We wanted to make this album because we had fun arranging [the songs]. The hardness of the album comes from how lucid and confrontational the lyrics and the themes are.”

The themes Logsdon mentioned range from family to love between a human being and an inanimate object. For Mumford’s, an album’s theme comes after the songs are written.

“The songs came first. This is always what happens for us, first there are the songs then there’s concept,” Logsdon said. “The concept for the record came more out of the way we grouped the songs together.”

One may notice warmth in the sound of the album. That is because Mumford’s recorded this album live and decided to record in the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames or UUFA church in West Ames for sonic purposes.

“It is acoustically a really beautiful space, and they have a really nice piano in there,” Logsdon said. “So they agreed to let us record, and we set up each of the instruments in a different room and we had Bryon, the recording engineer, set up in another room and we recorded it all live.”

Logsdon made it clear that the album’s sound cannot be credited to the space alone.

“It is a testament to Bryon’s skill as an engineer that has been so great as well. We also had it mastered by Doug Van Sloun of Focus Mastering in Omaha and his mastering services are a step above anything we’ve ever done before,” Logsdon said. “He’s really good he’s [mixed] Bright Eyes, all the Saddle Creek [Records] stuff. … We really wanted to bring out the best in the album and that [mastering] gave it the final polish.”

Bryon Dudley, owner and operator of the Spacement recording studio, said this album is the best Mumford’s has put out,

“I think they just keep getting better and better at what they do,” Dudley said. “[Mumford’s] were one of the first bands I ever recorded and it was just when they were brand new. I think the songs on this record are the most mature that Nate has written and that they have arranged as a band.”

Dudley also believes that this record moves even closer to finally capturing Mumford’s energetic live sound.

“I think this is about the closest they’ve gotten. It has a nice spunky energy to it, that’s what it feels like to me. I am hoping the album that they do next [will] really capture that raw energy,” Dudley said.

The most recently written song on the record is the album’s last track, “Don.” It was written for Don Mumford, the late Ames musician that played a large role in the band’s existence.

“’Don’ is the only song I have ever written that is from my own perspective. … Don Mumford is the reason that [Mumford’s] exists,” Logsdon said. “So many people that are currently playing music in Ames, how they met each other was through Don or how they learned to play drums was through Don.”

Many musicians long for those songs that seem to “write themselves,” come effortlessly. And for Logsdon, “Don” was one of those songs.

“I didn’t set out to write it, it was one of those [songs] that kind of wrote itself. It was kind of eerie to me. It gave me chills. It gave me goose bumps when I was first singing it because Don Mumford really haunts my life, but in a good way,” Logsdon said. “His influence and his presence has completely changed my life in every way and at strange moments he will make his presence known. His spirit and his consciousness and trails of his existence keep affecting me. And that’s what happened when I wrote that song.”