For the California-based quartet Color Green, playing music together is all about stepping into the unknown. “When we play live, I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” says Noah Kohll, one of the band’s two guitarists and four vocalists. “You really have no idea what you’re going to get with this band, which keeps things fresh for us and maybe makes the live experience special.” In a very short time, they have developed a word-of-mouth reputation as a dynamic and unpredictable live act, grounding their cosmic jams in earthy melodies and drawing from ‘60s SoCal folk-r0ck, ‘70s classic rock, ‘80s underground rock, ‘90s psychedelic dance-rock, and any other sound that catches their ears.

Adaptable onstage and off, Color Green has shared stages with a range of groups that reflect both the sophistication and the wild malleability of their sound, including Fuzz, Kikagaku Moyo, Circles Around the Sun, Hiss Golden Messenger, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, because they see boundless possibilities from one note to the next, they anchor their music in the urgent present rather than the distant past. Color Green can be a million different bands without losing their essential hue.

They capture that wild, mercurial quality on Fool’s Parade, a meditation on loss, grief, confusion, frustration, and the clarity to which they all lead. The album has the dynamic of a tight live set, full of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, quiet moments like the devastating “5:08” and reckless jams like the epic “Kick the Bucket.” “Four Leaf Clover” bustles and shimmies like the kaleidoscopic dance rock of the Stone Roses, while closer “Hazel Eyes” recalls the elaborate orchestrations of Brian Wilson and the whimsical melodies of Buddy Holly. “We shaped it to showcase our range,” says guitarist Corey Madden. “All the songs were written together as a band. It’s the four of us in a room, and it features all of our voices. It’s one step toward what this band truly is. We spent a lot of time getting our shit together as a band, and now it’s set in stone for me.”

Color Green started out as a very different, much more limited kind of group. “Me and Corey worked together in New York scooping coffee beans for a living and putting them into bags,” says Kohll. “I was living in a basement sublet, and he would come over to write and jam and record.” From those casual sessions came a self-titled EP in 2021, full of spectral jams and offerings up to Jerry Garcia, their spiritual guide. The next year they followed it up with a self-titled full-length via Aquarium Drunkard, with various friends helping to round out the songs. “These things happen in an interesting way,” says Kohll. “There’s been a lot of weird synchronization with this band. It’s all very organic. After we put out our first album, we thought, Oh, this needs to be a live band, too.”

After running through a few different rhythm sections, they met drummer Corey Rose and bassist Kyla Perlmutter, who not only are kickass players but opened up all new possibilities within Color Green. “Our first practice together, everyone was like, This is so loud,” says Rose. “That became a really important part of the band, and we try to capture that dynamic when we record.” Perlmutter adds, “We all really value each other’s input. It doesn’t feel like there’s an unfair hierarchy in this band. We respect each other’s tastes and recognize that we’re all very, very much in love with music in our own ways.”

After sharpening their attack on the road—playing DIY shows in small towns while opening for some of their heroes—the expanded Color Green began writing songs for what they considered a debut album. “One of us will come in with a riff or an idea, and the others will take it up and let it morph into something completely different,” says Perlmutter. “What we come up with together, I don’t think any of us could do by ourselves. The music we make is always surprising me.” The album’s title track, with its snaking guitar lines and parallax instrumental interplay, started out as an eastern jam when Rose came in with a very loose idea: “I wanted to write something in 6/8 time,” she says. “It was super awkward at first, but 40 minutes later, it sounded like Fairport Convention. It took everybody to get there.”

Says Madden, “I like when stuff happens and it opens up the door to something else in my brain. We might spend a lot of time working on something and get nothing out of it, but then in the back of my head I’m thinking, if you take this and add it to that… Sometimes it takes hours to figure out two seconds of a song, but it’s always worth it.”

The aching heart of Fool’s Parade is “5:08,” a moving expression of grief—not moving through it, necessarily, but simply living with it, moment to moment. “What’s it like, on the other side?” they all sing together, as though consoling one another. “Oh, the longing for the space to peer thru.” Inspired by the death of Madden’s father, it is rooted in a Spiritualized show. “I was going through some gnarly personal stuff,” says Madden, “and it was all hitting me at once, all these emotions. I talked my way through some crazy shit, and by the end of the show I had ‘508’ hashed out in my brain. It’s about losing people very close to you and wanting to communicate with them and not really knowing how.” “It’s the quietest song on the record,” says Rose, “but it’s also the heaviest. We all cried while recording it. Everybody’s singing on it, and everybody’s crying on it. Sometimes we’re like, Let’s not play that song tonight. It all depends on how we’re feeling.”