Each and every song on 2011’s Wind and Water sounds as if it was written over cups of tea in the kitchen of a family home. That’s because most—if not all—of them were. “Going Home” even lovingly references said kitchen. It’s a wholesome, long-running habit the Stiff Gins persist with to this day—and one they frequently enshrine with their fondness for “Inside My Kitchen” by fellow First Nations folk group, Tiddas. This is doubly significant: The duo—Yuwaalaraay woman Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs of the Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta people—honed their craft playing Tiddas songs when they first formed in 1999. That influence would understandably come to suffuse their initial work, but by the time Wind and Water was released in 2011, their earthy stories of the past, present, and future were being told with a simple, affecting modesty that was now unique to them. “Wind and Water knew what it was long before we did,” Simpson has since observed. There is a hallowed, comforting weight to hearing Briggs sing entirely in her traditional language for welcoming opener “Yandool”—and Simpson’s own background as a performing storyteller from the northwest plains of Crocodile Country frequently unearths endless legacies of deep feeling, such as on the terrestrial “Diamonds on the Water” and the magnificently heartfelt “Beacon.”