I love hearing about the games that people play on road trips. When my now-wife and I once made the eight-hour drive from Kansas City to Denver, she introduced me to a game that she and her family played when she was growing up called “my cows.” See a group of cows grazing on some grass at a farm off the roadside? Claim them as “my cows,” and you get points for it. See a cemetery? The other person can use that as a morbid opportunity to call “dead cows” to kill all your bovine pals, and you’ve got to start from scratch. But, if you see a church, you can resurrect them! Whoever has the most cows when you reach your destination wins the game. I imagine road-trip games are a favorite among touring bands, and Maya Bon and Ryan Albert, who perform as the indie-folk duo Babehoven, have a game of their own. Bon says in a press release that “Three Reds,” the penultimate track from their new album, I See Them, I See Me, is named after a game in which you count the number of cars of the same color, and you accrue points for each that passes by. “Call them out, get the points / Once they pass the car the row is clearly won” she sings, but, as expected, this silly game ultimately points toward something more profound: “I see your voice scream out around me / Like the waves are physically showing sound.” She watches those soundwaves round the bend and considers the past, present, and future, and how all three have led her and her bandmates to this moment, playing a lighthearted game to pass the time. There is no overarching narrative tying Babehoven’s latest album together, but, if there is one, it’s a subtle existentialism, a weighing of our collective circumstances and how we arrive at them. During Babehoven’s first headline tour in 2024, supporting that year’s Water’s Here in You, Bon’s right vocal cord succumbed to paralysis. She couldn’t sing for much of the following year, and it was possible that recovery might elude her altogether, an experience she explores on “Blue Around You.” “Yesterday a stranger told me they can see / That I feel levels of pain that could’ve broken me / And I said, mmm, but I survived it,” Bon sings over Big Thiefian alt-country and homespun Hardanger fiddle. Sometimes, those realizations assume darker hues, such as on “Lasagna,” which illustrates the inadvertent harm of becoming so close to someone that you both lose sight of the other person. There’s also the surrealist devastation that blankets “Am I in a Dream.” Alongside Squirrel Flower’s Ella O’Connor Williams, double-tracked vocals, and fiddle scrapes, Bon recounts a series of dreams while, in the background, she pictures her Topanga Canyon home on fire, another casualty of the destructive blaze that devastated much of the Los Angeles area in early 2025. This twangy turn is new to Babehoven’s sound, which has previously focused on a mix of slowcore, shoegaze, and indie-folk, but here those country stylizations find more pronounced footholds. Fiddles feature prominently, and co-producer Phil Weinrobe’s no-playback, no-headphones recording ethos leads to a live-band feel, highlighting the chemistry among the album’s six performers. Bon and Albert remain the figureheads, but the group they’ve assembled here—Oliver Hill, Zosha Warpeha, Dylan Nowik, Jared Samuel, Ellington Peet, and Nick Kinsey—is well-suited to the band-in-a-room environment. That decision feels all the more pointed given what happened to Bon on tour two years ago. Songs such as “Monster,” “Blue Around You,” and “Something True” are tried-and-true alt-country outings, but Babehoven sounds more at home when the fiddles and slide guitar take a backseat, supplying texture (as on opening track “You’re a Liar” and the hushed “Jess Has a Place”) rather than standing in the limelight, especially since every indie-rock band right now seems to be making a similar pivot, nearing the point of fatigue. But I See Them, I See Me, like its predecessor, is a mostly stunning collection of indie-folk tunes, thanks largely to Bon’s observant, thoughtful pen holding it together. On “Three Reds,” that song where she describes the band’s favorite road-trip game, she eventually dips into synesthetic reverie, absorbed by the red of the cars and its parallels with the red of her blood, and, by extension, everyone’s blood. “I see them and I see me,” she repeats in the outro, finding a triumphant solace in that mantra. With each repetition, her voice sounds stronger, as if she’s coming to a greater acceptance of her place in the world, feeling all the more fulfilled for it. To think it all came from a fun little game counting cars. [Double Double Whammy] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.