La Luz announce new album ‘Weirdo Shrine’

La Luz announce new album 'Weirdo Shrine,' the album comes out on August 7th via Hardly Art.

La Luz has announced the follow-up to their 2013 release It’s Alive. Recorded in a surf shop studio with producer Ty Segall, Weirdo Shrine is a noisier, more energized effort. “You Disappear,” the first mp3 single, premiered this morning and can be streamed below. The band are planning US and European tour dates, which they hope to announce soon.

For most, a brush with death would be cause for retreat, reflection, and reluctance, but Seattle band La Luz found something different in it: resilience. Having survived a high-speed highway collision shortly after releasing their 2013 debut LP It’s Alive, La Luz, despite lasting trauma, returned to touring.

When it came time to record Weirdo Shrine, their second album—due out August 7th—the goal was to capture the band’s restless live energy and commit it to tape. In early 2015, Cleveland and Co. adjourned to a surf shop in San Dimas, California where, with the help of producer/engineer Ty Segall, they realized this vision. Tracking most of the album live in shared quarters, La Luz chose to leave in any happy accidents and spur-of-the-moment flourishes that occurred while recording. Cleveland’s newly fuzzed-up guitar solos—which now incorporated the influence of Japanese Eleki players in addition to the twang of American surf and country—were juxtaposed against the group’s four-part harmonies to date. The organs of Alice Sandahl and the drumming of Marian Li Pino were granted extra heft and dimension. Thematically, Cleveland channeled Washingtonian poet Richard Brautigan on “You Disappear” and “Oranges,” and sought inspiration from Charles Burns’ Seattle-set graphic novel Black Hole.

In describing Weirdo Shrine, Segall remarked that it gave him a vision of a “world…burning with colors [he’d] never seen, like mauve that is living.” In “Oranges,” the Brautigan poem which inspired the aforementioned track of the same name, the poet writes of a surreal “orange wind / that glows from your footsteps.”

La Luz
Weirdo Shrine
CD/LP/digital
August 7th, 2015

01. Sleep Till They Die
02. You Disappear
03. With Davey
04. Don’t Wanna Be Anywhere
05. I Can’t Speak
06. Hey Papi
07. I Wanna Be Alone (With You)
08. I’ll Be True
09. Black Hole, Weirdo Shrine
10. Oranges
11. True Love Knows

Tour Dates:

06.07.15 – Vancouver, BC – Levitation Festival
06.18.15 – Seattle, WA – Sunset Tavern
07.10.15 – Seattle, WA – West Seattle Music Festival
07.17.15 – Carnation, WA – Timber! Outdoor Music Fesival %

% – w/ Tacocat, The Dead Milkmen, more

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