Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys Release a New Single ‘Ambient Heat’. As the second single off the album opens, a sudden and possibly forbidden warmth seems to drop into the solar plexus; it builds, along with the sound, eventually reaching the outermost boundary of the body. We could say that this heat continues, extending outward, colouring the aura of the listener––now vivid and radiating, possibly hot to the touch. A rumbling baseline, steady as a heartbeat, encourages this sensory extension. It seems to be reaching toward something, hoping to envelop; to absorb; to merge with the braver part of the self that exists freely outside an anxious perimeter. Lucy Kruger seems to spy this unbounded self in the distance, negotiating a new relation and proximity to being more electrically alive. Who do I place / in that hot seat / the kid the kid / that I was too afraid to meet / who skirts around / the edge of my fear / with grace desire death / beat after beat after beat / after rapturous beat
The grainy noise is gentle, somehow rendered delicate and precise. Still, it remains large and voluminous and—imbued with Kruger’s euphoric vocal—rises and sinks in the chest like breath, expanding into the back and straightening the spine as though a newly awakened desire was stretching itself into being. In this way, the band conducts the sensory body of the listener as though it is the final instrument in which they find resonance.
The lyric video––produced by South African studio GNOSSIENNE––worked to locate this radiating and vital heat in the words themselves. In tandem with chance distortions, the emergent and strangely prescient emphasis was animated by hand, growing up like ivy around the primal sonic heartbeat of the song.
‘The song is a bit of an existential fever dream, circling questions of care. On a very hot day in Neukölln, where I live in Berlin, the air seems to hover above the concrete. Ambient heat seeps into your bones and into your thoughts, until it feels like the world is trying to spit you out. As a child, heat like that was simply a sensation to be endured – and perhaps even enjoyed. Now it arrives as a painful question, a reminder, a reprimand – and a warning of so many other frightening things. The song comes out of that state.’
Unlike the Lost Boys’ earlier albums, produced within a specific moment in time, Pale Bloom emerged slowly, trying to suspend a creation myth in its amber – an origin tale that is ancient and complex; full of mystery and metaphor – that seeks neither clarification nor end.
Each Lost Boys’ release ventures into new musical and lyrical territory. Of them all, Pale Bloom reaches furthest back into childhood, unconsciously locating the rhythms and narrative styles rooted in the strictures of a religious upbringing. Sorting through the forgotten chords, refrains and melodies from old nursery rhymes and folk songs, they found a desire to bend these inherited sounds toward more personal truths.
This impulse is present throughout the album, audible in Kruger’s equally sonorous and euphoric voice, as she wraps the various lyrical forms around her own longing, mourning and desire, preparing them to land within the band’s lush and generous subversion of the remembered rhythms.
Unlike their appearance on Heaving and A Human Home, the strings here are less affected, having taken on a more sombre and serious character. They stretch towards a complex kind of heaven, made possible by the weight and grounding of the grooves, which are both stoic and expressive. The guitars roam freely in between stretching, voluminous spaces, and are as grinding as they are gentle. The players on the record are Lucy Kruger (voice and guitar), Liú Mottes (guitar), Jean-Louise Parker (viola), Gidon Carmel (drums) and Reuben Kemp (bass).
Kruger recorded the album with her bandmates and close collaborator, André Leo, split across their various studios in Berlin, over the course of six months. The album was mixed by Simon Ratcliffe.
Pale Bloom will be out through Unique Records in February 2026.
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Press release courtesy of Plug Music Agency
