Loma Announces New album, Share Video For New Song “How It Starts”
How can I live without a body? Out June 28 via Sub Pop
April 16, 2024
Photo by Emily Cross
Loma have announced a new album, How can I live without a body?and shared his first single, “How It Starts,” via a music video. How can I live without a body? will be released on June 28 via Sub Pop. The band's Emily Cross directed and stars in the video. Check it out below, followed by the tracklist and album art.
Loma consists of Shearwater singer Jonathan Meiburg, along with Emily Cross (of Cross Record) and Dan Duszynski. How can I live without a body? 2020 follows Do not be shy.
The pandemic found the band living on different continents, with Duszynski in central Texas, Cross in Dorset, England (he's a UK citizen) and Meiburg in Germany researching a book. Remote sessions didn't work, and an attempt to reconvene in Texas after the pandemic didn't bear much fruit when it was interrupted by illness.
“We got lost,” Meiburg says in a press release, “and stayed that way.”
“It's like a demon walks into the room every time we get together,” laments Cross.
Then, at Cross' suggestion, they gathered in a tiny stone house in England, a house that was a coffin workshop and where Cross works as an end-of-life doula. They turned it into a makeshift studio, with a vocal booth made from a coffin woven from willow branches.
“There was a sense that, well, this is it,” Meiburg says of the stone house sessions. “And when the ice storm swept through, I thought: let's go again, even the odds are against us. But sitting in our heavy coats around a small electric heater, we realized how much we had missed each other – and that just being together was precious.”
Legendary artist Laurie Anderson offered Loma the opportunity to work with an AI trained on her body of work. AI sent the group two poems in Anderson's style, in response to a photo sent by Meiburg from his book-in-progress on Antarctica. “We used parts of them in a few songs,” he says. “And then Dan noticed that one of his lines, 'How will I live without a body?' it would be a perfect name for the album, since we almost lost each other in the recording process.”
Anderson gave the band her blessing to use the title for their new album. “I think she was tickled that her AI was running around naming other people's files,” Meiburg says.
At the end of the day, the band's endurance paid off.
“Making this record tested us all,” says Duszynski. “I think that feeling was alchemized through the music.”
“Somehow, out of the chaos, we made something that sounds really loose,” says Cross.
“I've never run a marathon,” he adds. “But I can imagine it's something like that.”
Read our 2018 interview with Loma.
How can I live without a body? Track List:
1. Please come in
2. Arrhythmia
3. Untangling
4. I swallowed a stone
5. How it starts
6. Dark Trio
7. A stable mind
8. Pink sky
9. Broken bell
10. Kinship
11. Subversion
from our partners at http://www.undertheradarmag.com/news/loma_announce_new_album_share_video_for_new_song_how_it_starts
