Fish Pond Fish is the fourth studio album by Darlingside. It was released via More Doug on October 9th, 2020. The recording began in late 2019. At the suggestion of producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National), many components of the initial demos were preserved as layers in the produced tracks to retain the spirit of the initial recordings. In an interview for American Songwriter, cellist and guitarist Harris Paseltiner said: "When we did Birds Say, it was a lot of looking at where we came from, our childhoods and the past. With Extralife, things were shifting rapidly in the political climate and in the general feel of the world around us, what with climate change and that kind of thing. The group was looking towards the future. In this one, there’s a lot of looking at what’s directly in front of us. Kind of noticing the close small details of our day-to-day." The album's title is taken from the opening lines of the closing track, A Light On In The Dark: "Are you swimming with the fish pond fish, looking for oceans in the saltlessness?" As bassist David Senft explained to The Bluegrass Situation, the band was "thinking about social atomization and the idea that people become trapped in these false enclosures — fish ponds of our own making." The COVID-19 pandemic reframed the lyrics, he noted, as "suddenly that idea of shutting out the world became in one sense much more real, and we really did become trapped in our own physical little fish ponds — but I think it also hei