Just three days before playing a Sunday set at the Sasquatch! Music Festival last month, The Lonely Forest announced, via Facebook, that the show would be one of its last.

“It is with sadness that we announce to the world that The Lonely Forest is going on an indefinite hiatus,” the note read. “We’ve done many amazing things and met even more amazing people. The memories that we share with each other and our fans will never be forgotten.”

The note was signed by “Anthony, Braydn, Eric and John,” the four members who over the course of that near-decade had earned a local and national following with a bright, hopeful, anthemic kind of indie rock that had at its core conflict and a kind of darkness unique to the Pacific Northwest. The band’s high-energy performances helped it win the Sound Off! under-21 band battle at the EMP in 2006. Not long after, the group was signed to a major label and taken under the wing of Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and noted producer Chris Walla. These two developments, along with KEXP support from a deafening buzz in the Seattle music industry, signaled good things to come for the band.

But something went wrong along the way. The title of the band’s fourth full-length, Adding Up the Wasted Hours, signaled distress for the workhorse outfit. The songs revealed a band struggling, vacillating between resignation and strident defiance. The nature of the struggle was never made clear, but the result has become unequivocal.

The Lonely Forest’s upcoming Bumbershoot appearance will be its final show. But its

performance last Saturday, as part of the Catapult Music Series, was the band’s hometown farewell. Staged in an old warehouse on a dock at the end of the main drag in the small island town of Anacortes, it was little surprise that it sold out.

Anacortes’ rich musical culture was evident from the rest of the evening’s entertainment, which included three other bands with origins there, including ascendant pop act Cumulus. The town’s scene, anchored to the Pacific Northwest indie movement, played a major role in the story of K Records—and by extension Sub Pop, and, a bit further out, Nirvana.

Wearing a T-shirt from famed Anacortes’ record shop The Business, lead singer John Van Deusen paid tribute to that scene. He was in good company. Among the nearly 1,000 gathered were regional music heavyweights Phil Elverum, who performs as Mount Eerie, and Bret Lunsford, whose time as guitarist in the seminal Olympia band Beat Happening, and onetime ownership of The Business, has made him something of an Anacortes musical guru. Both artists played a role in forming The Lonely Forest’s musicianship.

Also assembled were family members and friends; the very old at the periphery, the very young on their parents’ shoulders. A core of teenagers occupied the area immediately in front of the stage, a diverse group: Here were music geeks, jocks, dropouts, crewcuts, preppies, and partiers, all of whom had come to say farewell to a band they’d known for a decade.

It was no happy homecoming. There was no clear anger or frustration onstage, just a palpable exhaustion that hung over a band that once crackled with so much energy. These were the young men that this community had sent out to conquer the world; and now here they were, back from a harrowing journey into the savage world of major record labels, discombobulated. Yet the community rallied with support, at the end of the main drag, with the brilliant sunset outside, watching a band it loves tear itself apart.

“This is obviously bittersweet,” Van Deusen said a few songs into the set, “but there’s no other way I know how to do this.”

By the end, he was without words. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Usually I have a lot to say, but I just don’t know . . . ”

At a loss, the band let its fans, friends, and family have the final word. After re-emerging for just one encore, the band tore into “We Sing in Time,” the song that years ago first launched the group. For the final chorus, Van Deusen turned the microphone to the crowd and let them sing it out: “In time the trees die and light will fade. But I hope for a new breath, a new life to take me away. In time.” E

mbaumgarten@seattleweekly.com