“So, where are we going, Matt? What’s going on?”

As the fog rolled in off of Narragansett Bay and onto the main stage of the Newport Folk Festival, Jessie and I found ourselves scurrying up one of the hills contained within the walls of Fort Adams in hot pursuit of Deer Tick and the Ice Cream Man…

There is something so infectious about the music of White Rabbits. Their songs seem to creep into the crevices of the brain and fester. Ever since the their 2007 release, Fort Nightly, I have been waiting with bated breath for their next album. 2009’s, It’s Frightening, delivers an evolved White Rabbits. The album provides a complex simplicity with a dark sophistication that makes any indie rock lover’s heart thump with pure bliss, and hey, it’s hard to have a bad album when Spoon’s Britt Daniel is producing it.

Sitting powwow style on the deck at Great Scott (frontman Joe D’Agostino and I sat on the floor because the chairs were all chained together. Ah, Allston.), Gab and I joked around with Staten Island-based up-and-comers Cymbals Eat Guitars.

The three of us were sitting in the back of Shay’s in Harvard Square facing three members of the band formerly known as Baker, and a bright blue spiral notebook was on the counter next to Steve’s sweating glass. After cracking jokes about how the stack of paper revealed the answers they had prepared for our impending interview, the reality was that Conan, Steve and Andy were gathering that night to come up with a new name for their band, and a list of potential names took up a few of the notebook’s pages.

There’s no denying it: The Antlers are indie darlings and have been since the release of their first album, Hospice, this past March. The band may be based in Brooklyn, but Pete, Mike and Darby have hardly spent any time recently in New York’s hipster haven: When we caught up with them before their Sunday set Upstairs at the Middle East a couple of weeks ago, Jessie and I were faced with three content, though slightly bewildered, guys who were making the last stop on a memorable jaunt about the country.