Son Lux is an experimental American band, having recently unveiled the first chapter of their ambitious three-volume album ‘Tomorrows I’. Ryan Lott is the band’s founder. As per usual their music is so real that their synths and guitar pitches give me shivers down my spine every time I listen to. The voice, the lyrics, the instruments they all resonate and give birth to a feeling, maybe that’s why they call themselves experimental.
The lyrics vibrate of loss, rebirth, hope, and resignation all at the same time, and although they are dark and twisted they come from such a deep place that you just want to sink along further into their core without hesitation or fear.
I love how each instrumental is a prelude for the song that follows. An interlude and a song earlier, the previously published ‘Plans We Made’ already has failed plans in its title. As is so often the case, Son Lux flirts with an ambiguity that extends even to the album title. This single ‘Plans We Made’ is quintessential Son Lux and up there with their best. I’d also argue the unpopular opinion that two of the instrumental pieces ‘Into Wind’ and ‘Involution’ are also two of the highlights of the album.
Son Lux would perhaps best be called progressive pop.
My personal favorite is ‘Honesty’, a song, that to me, is more of an eclectic poem than just a song. It makes me wear it on my lips during the day like a lie I tell myself or others when I am unhappy.
The lyrics “baptize the dead” Looking for “friendly ghosts” it’s like mirroring how you hope to change someone that you love and can’t let go of. Although that person you fell in love who died already, it’s just the ghost that lingers in your soul. ‘Tomorrows I’ is the prelude to an epic, three-part work that will be released over the next 12 months. In the first part, the former advertising composer Ryan Lott shines again with electronic elegy. The beauty of the songs is not just afforded by the stunningly gorgeous execution of each of the fragmentary ideas, nor the remarkable attention to detail in engineering and production that allows each layer to be as clear or as distorted, as symphonic or as industrial as it needs to be. It is also beauty from the brokenness itself. You can’t go without experiencing a new emotion after listening to them.
This is a masterful, meticulous, but still heaving and human art-pop record—a pop record to beat for 2020 so make sure you’ll give this guys a listen because honestly they are so underrated and it’s such a pity!
Follow SON LUX on: Facebook | Website | Instagram | Spotify
All photos: (c) Djeneba Aduayom
Miruna Vitriol
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