Son Lux has released a new track ‘Live Another Life’, along with a rework of it which includes rapper Nappy Nina.
This is the first single off their forthcoming album ‘Tomorrows II’, which will be released on December 4th, the second chapter in a three-volume body of work, which will unfurl over the coming year.
‘Live Another Life’ deals with the tension of control and how identities can be bound together in relationships. A simmering percussive loop sets the stage for Lott’s threadbare entrance: “I’m done asking you to be healed for me, I’m done asking you to heel to me.” As the music approaches a boil, bursts of a smeared, hashy choir undergird Lott’s lyrics as an abrupt flurry of drums snaps the song into an urgent tumble.
On the other hand, the rework “Live Another Life (Heal For Me)” trades the tactile percussive sounds of the original version for an unstable swirling haze of guitar-generated textures, grounded by heavy, mangled 808 kicks and gut-punch snares. Nappy Nina deftly delivers angular cadences on her two verses, diving deep into the nuances of a fraying relationship, reflecting: “we forage and make believe, force a forest with made up leaves.”
As ‘Tomorrows II’ opens, the listener joins an album already unfolding. The music provides an appropriate parallel for the sustained cacophony of the present moment, advancing a friction that reveals the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. While this carefully crafted inversion acclimatizes the ear to tension, the steadily hardening exterior fractures at unlikely moments, revealing a strikingly visceral, emotional core. The process of creating ‘Tomorrows’ is iterative in nature, with the lyrical content and music continually adapting and responding to one another and the shifting landscape of the moment.
Last week, Son Lux expanded the scope of ‘Tomorrows’ even further, launching their own artist-interviewing-artist podcast series, entitled ‘Plans We Make’. It sees the band members take turns speaking with guests about a shared theme in three volumes: Technology, Collaboration, and Voice.
The first episode of Volume 1 sees Son Lux’s Ryan Lott joined by multi-platinum record producer Chris Tabron, who has worked with Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Mary J. Blige, The Strokes and more. Out yesterday, the second episode features drummer Ian Chang interviewing Sougwen Chung, a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. And the third episode of this volume, out next week, includes a conversation between guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and Deantoni Parks, avant-garde percussionist and cofounder of experimental outfits Bosnian Rainbows, KUDU, and We Are Dark Angels.
More information can be found here.
Cover photo by: Djeneba Aduayom
