Darling Damselfly, a Philadelphia-based band, wants their most recent album, “Galapagos,” to get listeners thinking about humankind’s relationship with the planet — in the hopes of saving it.
“Being able to have a better understanding and appreciation of the wonder of [the environment] can help us be more connected and want to work harder to combat the impact of climate change and live more sustainably,” says Sammy Shuster, 38, the band’s singer-songwriter.
Shuster and Lexie Diallo — the two-person band’s violist — released “Galapagos” in October. The five-track album, which is available on Bandcamp, explores scientific phenomena from evolution to photosynthesis while prompting listeners to make connections to their own lives.

“I thought it would be cool to keep in the theme of nature and the environment and how those things relate to our own human experience,” says Shuster, who works a day job as a program manager at Drexel University’s The Environmental Collaboratory.
For instance, the track “Whale Song” is about the vocalization of the giant, underwater mammals and how their ability to communicate with each other is hampered by human activity. Shuster connects this experience to the loneliness people sometimes feel, singing: “All alone in this noisy sea, my voice gets deeper, deeper, deeper. Can you hear me?”
And in “Secret Decisions,” Shuster highlights plants’ ability to control how much carbon dioxide they absorb — a show of self-confidence, a skill that is sometimes elusive to humans, Shuster says, singing: “I am afraid that I can’t be as strong as your DNA. I don’t take what I need. I hide or I run while your leaves or your vines, they reach out to the sun.”
Throughout the album, it’s the viola that helps bring Shuster’s lyrics to life, mimicking the sounds and movements of the songs’ animal subjects.
On the title track, the viola “goes back and forth, up and down from one string to another” like monkeys swinging from tree branches, says Diallo, 42.
On “Tasmanian Tiger” — a song about whether to revive the past or look to the future — the instrument sounds like the barking and grunting of the now-extinct mammal that gives the track its name. And on “Birds and Butterflies” — which explores the patterns embedded in humans and animals — the viola soars into its higher registers like a winged creature.
“You can look toward these things that we study as a source of wonder in the world,” says Shuster.

The album is accompanied by a zine that includes not only the songs’ lyrics but also illustrations, relevant scientific explanations and reflective prompts for listeners to consider.
“I think the zine helps to tie things in with listening to it,” says Diallo, adding that the prompts invite the audience to think about “the ways that we’ve evolved, the ways that folks are using the environment and how that affects the natural world.”
As inspiration for including a zine with “Galapagos,” Shuster cites the lyric book that accompanied the 1995 album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” by The Smashing Pumpkins. She asked her husband, illustrator Corey Bechelli, to create artwork for the zine, and he brought his wife’s vision to life.
Bechelli, 43, says that he and Shuster regularly have conversations about the environment even outside of the creation of “Galapagos.”
Global warming can feel like too large of a problem to address individually, leaving people feeling “hopeless and helpless,” Bechelli adds. But embracing despair isn’t an option for the couple, he says, especially because they have a young son.
“You can lean into the hopeless and helpless, but that’s probably not the right way to go,” Bechelli says. “We can get through this somehow.”
And that, he says, is part of the question “Galapagos” grapples with: “How can we find hope somehow?”