Lanterns On The Lake have announced news of their new studio album, Spook The Herd, released 21st February via Bella Union and available to preorder here. Additionally, the band have announced an extensive UK tour including a headline show at London’s EartH, the dates of which are below, and shared a striking b/w video for lead track “Every Atom”. Of the track Lantern’s vocalist Hazel Wilde says: “This is a song about grief and how your subconscious takes a long time to accept when someone is dead and gone forever, even when the rational side of you understands it. I put that idea into a story where the narrator is my subconscious searching for someone in this dream-like fictional world. I go to the extremes to search for even just a trace of them… through all of space and time, splitting every atom, ‘until Andromeda and the Milky Way collide’. I won’t give up. I can’t let go.” Click HERE to watch.
It’s strange – not to mention fundamentally disconcerting – to live through turbulent times. Yet as many feel like the world is slipping out of control, artists are enlivened as they seek to make sense of the shifting sands. Hazel Wilde of Lanterns on the Lake is now a songwriter necessarily emboldened. On Spook the Herd, the band’s fourth record, her voice and preoccupations rise to the fore like never before. In tandem, the band break new ground on a set of songs that are direct and crucial.
Wilde does nothing less than dive headlong into the existential crises of our times. Beginning with the record’s title – a pointed comment at the dangerously manipulative tactics of ideologues – its nine songs turn the microscope to issues including our hopelessly polarized politics, social media, addiction, grief and the climate crisis.