Over the past year, there have been several local opportunities to hear Bend-based quartet Wilderness perform live.

This is, after all, a band that squeezed four gigs into 24 hours over Memorial Day weekend.

They certainly haven’t been hiding.

But on stage was the only place you could hear them. In a time when stocking various online profiles with sound samples is rule No. 1 in the “How to Be a Band in the 21st Century” handbook, Wilderness elected to remain digitally silent.

No music on Facebook. No Soundcloud or Bandcamp profile. Not even shaky YouTube videos.

In their place, a welcome air of sonic mystery.

That mystery suits Wilderness and its soft-spoken, 34-year-old frontman Jared Nelson Smith, who, along with his now-wife and keyboard player Nora, wandered into Bend three years ago and never left.

“We had to get out of L.A.,” Smith said in a recent interview. “We drove around with a camper for like four months trying to find somewhere to go. And we were here and it started snowing and we thought, ‘Well, I guess we’ll stay here.’”

Smith, who now manages Crow’s Feet Commons, spent 14 years in Los Angeles working as a stylist for photo shoots and playing in a band that had “moderate success” before imploding, he said.

In 2010, he and Nora loaded into a vintage camper and headed north, eventually stopping in Central Oregon. They were drawn to Bend’s sense of community and natural beauty, which reminded them of their small home town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Over the next two years, the couple formed Wilderness and began playing live. Drummer Bradley Parsons and bassist Nick Graham round out the core lineup, though the band will expand to nine for Monday’s show at Crux Fermentation Project, a celebration of the new Wilderness album “Homeward From the Battle” (see “If you go”).

“I was slowly repositioning what I wanted to do, music-wise,” Jared Smith said. “Instead of this ‘Let’s conquer the world!’ thing that was the focus before, find a more localized, regional thing.”

Early this year, Smith took his recording gear — “one good mic and seven questionable mics, duct tape and other stuff,” he said — to a friend’s ranch on the outskirts of Bend and set up to make “Homeward.”

He had songs written and worked out, but was careful to let them develop on their own.

“I try to find a way to make something that is what it needs to be and not what I think it should be,” Smith said.

“So I think that there’s a way to come at songwriting where you’re like, ‘I want to be this kind of band. I want to be this sort of music,’” he said. “I try to refrain from all of those things.”

Good instinct. “Homeward” is a collection of exquisitely crafted tunes that live somewhere near the intersection of folk, pop and rock music, with an experimental streak that occasionally runs the stop sign. At times, Wilderness sounds like a north-of-the-border version of Southwestern roots act Calexico, or an earthbound take on Explosions in the Sky’s celestial jams, or somnambulant rockers Wilco indulging their ragged edge.

“Broken Man” starts off with a vaguely African guitar riff before soaring into a lush chorus. “Shoot the Moon” is a love song powered by prickly guitars and a distant, robotic pulse. About halfway through, “Don’t You Think It’s Time” shifts from folksy slow-burner to whooshing space-noise excursion.

But most of all, “Homeward” is spacious and reverberant; Smith succeeded in capturing not only the notes and rhythms, but also the atmosphere around them. In that space, his relaxed folk tunes regularly unfold into dizzying crescendos of melody and strange sounds. The end result is charming, cool, and well worth the effort of repeated listens.

“Homeward” is a wonderful listen, but it is not perfect. Nor would Smith want it to be.

“I like it to be sort of spontaneous sounding, kind of a mess,” he said. “I don’t pitch-correct things. I don’t re-sing them. I don’t re-play them. I just let them be what they’re going to be because they’re supposed to be that.”

If you go

What: Wilderness album release, with Terrible Buttons and Joel Sousa

When: 7-10 p.m. Monday

Where: Crux Fermentation Project, 50 S.W. Division St., Bend

Cost: Free

Contact: www.facebook.com/wildernesstheband