Tomorrows II Son Lux

• 1Warning03:02
• 2Molecules04:46
• 3Prophecy04:49
• 4Leaves06:22
• 5Out of Wind01:37
• 6Apart03:31
• 7Bodies02:45
• 8Weight of Your Air03:26
• 9Live Another Life05:09
• 10Borrowed Eyes01:40
• Total Runtime37:07

Info for Tomorrows II

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.

More pervasive than a virus, anxiety and urgency has spread across our physical and virtual landscapes. The growing inequities of centuries old and current day complexes of oppression has reached a critical and necessary breaking point, forcing us out of our severe isolation back together in a call for justice. All the while, the continued trajectory towards climate catastrophe still creeps across the horizon into our view, another result of the valuing of profit over people.

These defining traits of the present moment find parallels on the newest body of work by Son Lux: Tomorrows, a long-format album to be released in three volumes over the course of a year. On Tomorrows, Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang train their sights on volatile principles: imbalance, disruption, collision, redefinition. But for all of its instability, Tomorrows’ exploration of breaking points and sustained frictional places is ultimately in service of something rewarding and necessary: the act of questioning, challenging, tearing down and actively rebuilding one’s own identity.

“We’re peeling things apart and putting them back together throughout this record,” explains Lott. “Emotionally, relationally, and musically.”

Though Son Lux embraces musical exploration as a foundational practice, the band has never before experimented with format. Tomorrows does away with the restrictions of the traditional album, marking a notable departure in feeling from past releases. Whereas prior Son Lux albums have been packed to the brim with ideas, the three-volume format of Tomorrows affords the music space to breathe and develop. Each release sees songs spun together with liminal instrumental spaces, resulting in a more natural flow while letting sound lead in conveying the complexity and tension of the story.

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a musical test kitchen, questioning deeply held assumptions and rebuilding music from a molecular level. The band eschews genre conventions in favor of cultivating their own personal musical language rooted in balancing opposites. But on Tomorrows, they sometimes allow the scales to tip, resulting in a galvanizing internal violence that pushes songs to their limits. A prepared guitar melody folds over itself repeatedly, forming a chirping thicket. Drum pulses fan outwards and multiply across registers, aggregating into a throbbing mass. Diving cellos peel apart like weights on a pendulum before snapping together anew.

As much as confronting sustained instability is part of the album’s message, it is also central to the band’s creative approach. “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.”

While the music on Tomorrows has been in development for the last three years, the lyrical content was written over the last three months, reflecting the tumultuous energy and paradigm shifts of our relationships to each other, our histories, and our expectations for tomorrow. Son Lux’s songs are constructed through an “inverted” writing process in which the lyrics score the instrumental, as opposed to the other way around. Meaning is often meant to be understood within the context of — or even recontextualized by — the sound. On lead single “Plans We Made,” a clock-like pulse emerges in the decay as Lott sings, “what is permanent remains.” Bhatia and Chang’s elastically lurching rhythms on “Only” are belied by Lott’s lyrics: “When you took me for the days, you took from the years.” “You’re reaping what you’ve sown,” Lott sings on “Honesty,” as an uneasy surge of bending strings rises up and threatens to consume the mix, “but what you hoped would never grow.” The introspective tone that begins “Undertow” — “count for me the cost, the number of tomorrows lost” — eventually turns outward in a plea for help as the music crests into its apex. “Come find me,” Lott sings from within crashing waves of sound, “if it’s not too late.”

Since starting Son Lux as a solo project, founder Ryan Lott has garnered a reputation as “the kind of songwriter who can turn the most intimate moments sweeping and majestic” (Pitchfork). But after crafting his first three albums alone, Lott stumbled upon a kinship with two musicians a decade his junior that was too strong to ignore: Ian Chang, whose rhythmic constructions “don’t feel so much like beats as sculptures” (NPR), and Rafiq Bhatia, who treats musical ingredients “as architectural elements — sound becomes contour; music becomes something to step into rather than merely follow” (New York Times). After collaboratively creating, releasing, and touring 2015’s Bones and 2018’s Brighter Wounds, Son Lux has solidified into a band, with each member bringing their unique sonic approach to create an otherworldly whole.

Son Lux’s sound is distinctly individual, a result of their reverence for artists who have carved an iconoclastic path forward. The band’s fluid approach to genre and structure draws on the groundwork of soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation, owing a debt to forebears as wide-ranging as Björk, Alice Coltrane, D’Angelo, Bob Dylan, and J Dilla. While their balancing of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions has earned comparisons to contemporaries like James Blake and Flying Lotus, Son Lux feels that it is the act of distilling their varied influences that has most strongly shaped their identity. On Tomorrows, they conjure vivid, unexpected worlds of sound, evoking textures as different as those of Timbaland and Terry Riley within the same composition.

Arriving at a time of considerable uncertainty in the world, Tomorrows is ambitious in scope and intent. Born of an active, intentional approach to shaping sound, the music reminds us of the necessity of questioning assumptions, and of sitting with the tension.

Son Lux

Son Lux
is the grand genre-less dream of Los Angeles composer Ryan Lott brought to roiling, vivid life with the help of two New Yorkers, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. Each is a writer, producer, and performer with omnivorous taste and a penchant for wild improvisation. The band’s unique mix of electronic pop, unusual soul, and outright experimentalism feels more inviting than ever on their fifth album, Brighter Wounds. The songs therein leave behind Son Lux’s typical universal themes for deeply personal fare. While making Brighter Wounds, Lott became a father and lost a family member to cancer. Days of “firsts” were also days of “lasts,” and the normal fears that accompany parenthood were compounded by a frightening new reality—Lott’s son arrived shortly after Election Day. These songs draw on all of that: warm reflections of a fading past, pain wrenched from a still-present loss, and a mix of anxiety and hope for a future that is promised to no one.

Lott’s voice, which ranges from ghostly whisper to choir-backed shout, is propelled by the trio’s most dynamic score yet. Listen to the anthemic roar of “Dream State.” A yell blasts through a cloud of woodwinds and synths, and the song is off on a ceaseless tear. “Though we are wide awake, this is a dream state,” Lott sings through the technicolor haze, clinging to opposites. A momentary breath breaks the stride, before the journey resumes with even greater abandon. A choir enters the fray at the song’s apex with a refrain heard elsewhere on the album: “out of the dark day, into the brighter night!”

Launched in 2008 with At War with Walls & Mazes, Son Lux was initially a solo affair, the result of a classically trained mind straining against the constraints of the medium, turning piles of self-sourced note snippets into pulsing digital orchestras. Across 2011’s We Are Rising and 2013’s Lanterns, Lott maintained his auteur approach while broadening the Son Lux sound and guest list to unexpected results. The latter album drew the attention of several major pop acts, many of whom incorporated moments from the album into their own works (Halsey, Fashawn, Fall Out Boy). Lorde even teamed up on a redux of “Easy,” and covered the song on tour. Bhatia and Chang, first brought on to help tour Lanterns, soon found a home in Son Lux, cowriting 2015’s Bones with Lott while on the road. Brighter Wounds initially took shape remotely—the distance allowing Lott to sift through life-altering events—and was finalized together. The result is Son Lux's most dynamic, most frayed and yet prettiest and most inviting work to date.

In recent years, Son Lux has collaborated with a broad and eclectic collection of artists, including Moses Sumney, Nico Muhly, Chris Thile, Beyoncé producer Boots, and Woodkid. Lott's extracurriculars have included Sisyphus (with Sufjan Stevens and Serengeti), scoring three feature films and composing music for the Grammy-winning record Filament by Eighth Blackbird. Meanwhile, Bhatia and Chang have each continued to develop their solo projects while working with the likes of Matthew Dear, Vijay Iyer, Sam Dew, and Landlady.

This album contains no booklet.