They arrived with the full impact of Lauren Bacall’s great line, “If you want to capture someone’s attention, whisper...”

In the big bam wham glam of the hair metal era ranging from Motley Crue to Poison and the new wave sleek of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, the Cowboy Junkies dialed everything down, playing their instruments in a decidedly lo-fi way. They were the most watched band on the horizon as the ‘80s turned to the ‘90s.

Drifting almost weightless, ambient, yet present like Spanish moss on an oak, the band formed by siblings Margot, Michael and Peter Timmins, and Alan Anton, transfixed a churning MTV world with an organic way of coming to and at the music, with their Trinity Sessions, released in 1988. Buoyed by a particularly narcotic reading of Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane, as well as a core band that employed the accordion, upright bass and mandolin, the album saw platinum certification for over a million copies sold.

“We didn’t come as schooled musicians,” Michael Timmins recalls on the phone from his Toronto home. “We came from the punk movement, where you pick up a guitar, or the drums, and you play. You get in front of the mic, and you sing. So ‘the sound’ is the four of us playing together. That makes this very true, and that ‘sound’ is basically just how we play together.”

On July 19 when the Junkies play the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Concert Series, that sound will be in full force. In the spirit of punk, when the siblings came together, they wanted to do something different, so they took the country, blues, jazz and even noise influences they were drawn to, and created a palette that was hushed, drawing listeners closer to their recordings. It worked.

Thirty years later, the band is not only still together, they’re thriving.

NPR music writer and Pop Culture Happy Hour podcaster Stephen Thompson confesses of his lifelong relationship with the band’s music since Trinity Sessions was released.

“Cowboy Junkies’ music has been a go-to source of calm for this anxious high schooler turned anxious college student turned anxious young professional turned anxious young parent turned anxious middle-aged parent,” he says. “It’s soothing, but it has a tension to it. Records like Lay It Down got their hooks in me pretty deeply, and have lost nothing with age.”

Part of their success roots in the family connection, but it extends beyond common memory banks. As Timmins offers, “We have shared values. Integrity is very important to us. We learned those values from our parents. It has to be real and true to who we are.

“We want to make good music. We always wanted to make good music, so when we get old and look back we can think, we did that sincerely. We believed in the songs.”

Believing in the songs comes naturally to the band. For the Timmins, it is Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zant and “Neil Young’s better songs” that serve as their North Star.

“Townes made me think about the world, and who I was in the world and the world around me,” Timmins says.

That slow simmer is bolstered by extremely literate lyrics and a mélange of covers/influences including Muddy Waters’ Baby Please Don’t Go, Hank Williams’ I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper, Patsy Cline Walking After Midnight, Bill Monroe/Elvis Blue Moon Revisisted (Song for Elvis) and Lou Reed Sweet Jane. On their new All That Reckoning, those same minimalist atmospherics still define the Junkies’ sound.

“If there’s one thing that’s continual, we’re very mindful of space. From the Trinity Sessions forward, we’ve looked at that as part of the sound. As soon as something is unnecessary or not adding something, we take it out... I was just listening to the test pressing of the Trinity [30th anniversary] remastering, and now I can really feel what people felt about that record.

“We were a response in some ways to what was going on. We were a little before Nirvana, who was much more forceful and in a more commercial way wiped it away. But we were responding to the same things.”

For Reckoning, the writing boasts a visceral immediacy. “It had been six years, and I wanted everything to have a fine point. I ask myself, is it true? Does it need to said? My hope is every word has relevance and a deeper meaning. The idea that it’s evocative, maybe makes you have a conversation with someone else, or even yourself, is the hope.”

Beyond the musical influences, the man who reads Rachel Kushner, Richard Ford, Junot Diaz among many, went to William Blake as a source. “His poems are basically songs. The Mountain Stream and Missing Children are extensions of his poems, and I try to build the melodies and structures around the words.

“To me, it’s more important to have the right words than the melody and the rhyme. Ultimately, it’s up to the band to make songs work in the playing, but we all want the songs to endure.”

When Michael told his sister Margot about All The Reckoning, she told him it had to be the title. The song — delivered in two decidedly different treatments — is a harbinger for the times. Like The Things We Do To Each Other and Sing Me A Song, it might be personal, political or universal.

“It’s a reassessing and looking at things from different viewpoints, or it can be things curving back around,” Timmins explains. “It cuts right to the bone for me. To me, this record is full of possibilities: social, political, global and how things merge.

“In the end, it comes down to asking questions. Music has been so absorbed into the culture, and once that happens, it’s harder for music to change things. But one person at a time, asking things and talking to their partner, their neighbor, the person at work, I think that’s how [minds open.

“Most politics are ultimately personal, and most of our records are personal politics. So in the end, how we relate to each other drives us. A lot of the songs are how do we ask the questions? Once we do, then what?”

The Cowboy Junkies play the Old Whaling Church as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Concert Series on Thursday, July 19 beginning at 8 p.m. Visit mvconcertseries.com for information and tickets.