LUCY KRUGER & THE LOST BOYS – new album out
- Posted on 01-06-2024
Photographer – Francis Broek
Less than a year after the release of ‘Heaving’, Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys have shared a new album. ‘A Human Home’ was written and recorded during lockdown in Lucy’s room in Berlin. This low-fi, intimate, and expressive collection of musical sketches explores what it means to find and feel at home. Featuring a number of accidental and deliberate remote collaborations, it documents a specific, personal, and universally shared moment in time.
Initially, the project aimed to gather poems, sketches, and different artistic expressions from friends and family to explore their experiences of isolation and use these as starting points for songs. However, what felt more interesting and truer were the unscripted conversations Lucy was having at the time. She collected voice notes and texts from friends and allowed them to inform her writing. The making of the album was a deliberate attempt to embrace the influence of others on her creative and personal process, acknowledging how much of home lies not only in place but in the people we love.
The album artwork was created by Julia Schimautz at DTAN studio, with photography by Francis Broek and hair, make-up, and styling by Lenny-Dee Nielson.
The album is out through Unique Records and can be bought here –
Bandcamp: https://lucykruger.bandcamp.com/album/a-human-home
Permanent Record (SA): https://www.permanentrecord.co.za/products/lucy-kruger-the-lost-boys-a-human-home
QUOTE ABOUT THE ALBUM:
“When you are still long enough, anything can become an object of contemplation. During the lockdown, my room became the centre of the story for a moment, and I became a part of its changing narrative. The furniture felt more alive than I’d allowed it to be before. I wondered about all it had experienced and witnessed. Bodies, objects, temperature, and time leave marks on physical objects. It gave me space to think about the kinds of marks we as humans leave on the world and one another.
The inevitability of indents and impressions. Berlin was the place I was living when a virus stopped the world in its tracks – but I wasn’t quite sure if it was home. There was a sea between me and my family and no way to cross it, except through the telephone, the computer screen, and a body, heart, and brain full of memories, feelings, thoughts, and imagination.
A body in a room in a city in a world in a universe in a city in a room in a body. I tried very hard to play, musically, with the quiet tension of the time. To find a way to connect – inside and outside. It’s a funny thought – to work hard at playing. But perhaps not such an easy task for an adult. I used voice notes, images, and sounds sent by friends as departure points for the songs and then sent those sketches to other friends. I wanted to feel the exchange, the change, the intimacy of sharing solitude. To see what seeds and scars would grow and show from a shared storytelling.
This was my first time writing without using the guitar as the starting point, and I promised to let go of judgement in the process. It was a naive and feeling-based exploration of sampled drum sounds and synths, along with some more familiar guitar-based songs. ‘A Human Home’ is an attempt to enter the unknown, holding the hands of previously known and loved sounds, spaces, and sentiments. A reckoning with the finite infinite, or the other way around. An attempt to come home, to leave, to return, to surrender. It features lots of friends (Liú Mottes, Jean-Louise Parker, André Leo, Frank Rosaly, Alexandra Duvekot, Victoria Landy, Guy Buttery, and Calvin Siderfin) in a variety of forms. I think it’s a strange celebration and a tiny act of defiance and survival.”
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