Low was formed in Duluth, Minnesota in 1993 by husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. For nearly three decades, they helped define and then quietly outlast an entire movement, their spare, hymn-like songs and ineffable vocal harmonies becoming a touchstone for slow, lovely, and purposeful music-making. Even as slowcore contemporaries leaned on conventional songwriting, Low kept finding new ways to surprise. They were, as a fellow musician once put it, getting more adventurous as they got older, not tamer.

Across thirteen albums and nearly thirty years, Low built one of the most quietly radical catalogs in independent music, moving from the hushed minimalism of their early records through landmark releases like Things We Lost in the Fire, The Great Destroyer, and Drums and Guns, each one finding new ways to expand what a song could hold. Their faith, their marriage, their home in Duluth, the world’s accumulated grief, it all went in. What came out was music that felt economical and immense at the same time. Their final records, Double Negative (2018) and HEY WHAT (2021), both made with producer BJ Burton, marked a stunning late-career reinvention, the band’s harmonies cresting through walls of noise and corroded sound, arriving at something that felt both completely new and unmistakably theirs.

Mimi Parker died in November 2022, after a battle with ovarian cancer. Her voice, and everything she and Alan built together, remains.