Luluc singer songwriter from Brooklyn, New York are excited to announce their fifth album “Diamonds”, due September 15th via Community Music. The announcement is heralded by the release of the album’s title track alongside a striking black-and-white video, a perfect visual accompaniment to the placid dreaminess of the music.
“The songs speak for themselves, they contain all you will need. It doesn’t feel right to say ‘what they are about,” the band’s Zoë Randell says about the album. “What inspired them is, as always, vast and uncontainable. The personal is of course in there, but only in a detached way, and I use it only to launch or find a way into the possibilities and ideas. I do it that way, so the songs can be for you, whoever the listener is, or may be. Not as some kind of catharsis session for me.
“I/we want to create expansive, deep worlds that go well beyond the sense of author, and creators, to create musical and lyrical spaces that have layers and (hopefully) intrigue. That reward you when you come back, and that you can enjoy in different moods and modes. Loud or soft. It does feel akin to a kind of diamond mining. It requires going into depths, not always or at all easy, and then getting the idea all the way to something that gleams and glints; and offers a sense of music and light, a sense of the richness that is everywhere if you get your perspective just so.”
Through their 14-year creative partnership, the duo of Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett have carved a formidable niche for themselves with their imaginative folk, successively incorporating new elements as disparate as icy synths and warm brass with each new album. After several Sub Pop releases, collaborations with Aaron Dessner, and tours with J Mascis and more, Luluc has reached a new creative peak with “Diamonds”, and it feels very much like their true time in the spotlight has arrived.
“Spare and haunted, with electronic sputters that ominously circle Randell’s singing,
“Luluc’s dream world, like the real one, is still complicated: at times as idyllic as the vision of “blue water and sunshine” in the Carpenters-esque “Dreaming”; at times a claustrophobic nightmare roping you in against your will.” – UNCUT
releases September 15th, 2023
Zoe Randell – voice, guitars
Steve Hassett – voice, guitars, synths, piano, bass, drums & percussion
Stuart Bogie – horns (tracks 1 & 5)
JT Bates – drums (tracks 1, 3 & 5)
Richard Vaudrey – cellos (tracks 4, 6 & 8)
Horn arrangements by Steve Hassett & Stuart Bogie
String arrangements by Steve Hassett & Zoe Randell
All songs written and produced by Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett except As Tears Go By, written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Loog Oldham
The Fat Angel Sings 