Son Lux’s Three-Album Cycle Taps Into Current ‘Paradigm Shifts’

Experimental indie rock act Son Lux just issued “Plans We Made,” the first single from Tomorrows, an ambitious, three-volume album that will come out over the course of the next year. The cycle’s first chapter arrives everywhere via City Slang on August 14.

The track, which features guest vocals from acclaimed singer-songwriter Kadhja Bonet, immediately establishes the band’s approach on the album. It features quivering vocals and clunky percussion and sounds something like the trip-hop of Portishead with its “clock-like pulsebeat, sharp stabs, and lashing string sounds expertly conveying the band’s lyrical struggles with inevitability, the arc of time, and the fragility of our best intentions.”

Tomorrows finds the trio — Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang — writing songs that question, challenge, tear down and actively rebuild one’s own identity. 

“We’re peeling things apart and putting them back together throughout this record,” says Lott in a press release. “Emotionally, relationally, and musically.”

While Tomorrows has been in development for the last three years, the album’s lyrical content was written over the last three months; the content reflects the “tumultuous energy and paradigm shifts” of our current situation.

“The sound of Son Lux is discovered through a very intentional and deliberate process of experimentation where the end result is often entirely unknown,” says Lott. “We’re constantly exploring and trying out different options. We can’t anticipate what the music will become.”

Hailed by Drowned in Sound for “bringing order to heaps of seemingly chaotic and dissonant sounds, and fashioning melody out of the unorthodox,” Son Lux began as a solo project by Los Angeles-based Lott but expanded in 2014 with the involvement of drummer Ian Chang and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia.

Tomorrows marks the first new Son Lux LP since 2018’s Brighter Wounds, hailed by Pitchforkfor its “searching introspection and dramatic gestures.”