LYR - The Ultraviolet Age (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/48]

LYR thrive on the unexpected. As a genre-splicing supergroup of sorts, comprised of author and current British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, musician Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson, the band is a nexus of diverse creative disciplines, and one of the most thrilling musical prospects around. Following their acclaimed debut, 2020's Call In The Crash Team, LYR's second album is The Ultraviolet Age. This is a more accessible album, pitched somewhere between the enigmatic brood of late period Talk Talk, the lo-fi expanse of Low and their British sprechgesang contemporaries including Dry Cleaning, Yard Act and Black Country, New Road.

It is an album of deft character sketches, dictatorships, the climate crisis and gorgeous and moving observations on the times we live in.

The album’s centre piece, The Song Thrush And The Mountain Ash is an overdue moment of sonic reflection on a collective trauma.

While elsewhere, there’s plenty of the storming northern noir that has become LYR’s signature – from the brooding Paradise Lost to clattering malevolence of Presidentially Yours, and Living Legend, a track Armitage describes as “a pen portrait of somebody who is obsessed with somebody from the rock’n’roll past to the point of infatuation or impersonation, maybe even reincarnation.”

Tracklist
01. Paradise Lost
02. The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash
03. Living Legend
04. Seasons Out of Phase
05. The Bitter End
06. Presidentially Yours
07. Fishing Flies
08. Heart for Sale
09. Hockney Red
10. To the Fashion Industry in Crisis