Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Budgie and Jacknife Lee have announce their debut album Los Angeles, will drop on November 3 via Play It Again Sam Records. The album dive features The Edge (U2), Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Civil Rights avant-garde artist Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Starcrawler vocalist Arrow de Wilde, Mark Bowen (IDLES) and more. The band has also shared the album’s title track and first single which features James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), along with a video – listen and watch HERE.

The album was born out of a curiosity which just wouldn’t die. Made up of two of the inventive and post-punk drummers Lol Tolhurst, Budgie from Siouxsie & The Banshees, and The Creatures, along with producer and multi-instrumentalist Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee.

Los Angeles is described as a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children”, where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals. Throw in the terrifying uncertainty occasioned by the global pandemic, which both interrupted and ultimately aided its genesis, and the ‘new Cold War’ terror that has ensued, and you get a record fueled by fear and tension, but whose propulsive beats, mind warping, mangled instrumentation and exceptional vocal contributions provide release through the palpable joy of their creation.

Lol Tolhurst will also release his second book, GOTH, on September 26 in the U.S. via Hachette. The engaging historical memoir of Goth music and the culture explores creative giants like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and many more great bands that offered a place of refuge for the misfits of the 80s and ever since. GOTH offers a fascinating deep dive with stories and anecdotes from Tolhurst’s personal memories as well as the musicians, magicians, and artists who made goth an inevitable and enduring movement

Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee
Los Angeles
Track Listing
Olay It Again Sam

1. This Is What It Is (To Be Free) [with Bobby Gillespie]
2. Los Angeles [with James Murphy]
3. Uh Oh [with Arrow de Wilde and Mark Bowen (IDLES)]
4. Ghosted At Home [with Bobby Gillespie]
5. Train With No Station [with The Edge]
6. Bodies [with Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore]
7. Everything And Nothing
8. Travel Channel [with Pam Amsterdam]
9. Country of the Blind [with Bobby Gillespie]
10. The Past (Being Eaten)
11. We Got To Move [with Isaac Brock]
12. Noche Oscura [with The Edge]
13. Skins [with James Murphy]

As the record evolved, there would be instrumental contributions from noted guitarists, including The Edge and IDLES’ Mark Bowen, but the rest were handled by Lee, and often digitally distorted beyond all recognition. Further visitors to Lee’s Topanga hideout were master orchestrator Davide Rossi (Goldfrapp, Coldplay) and brass specialist Jordan Katz (Father John Misty, Ghostface Killah), whose taut arrangements were similarly manipulated, and even run at half speed, for maximum disorientation and weirdness.

Come March 2020, they were fairly certain they were just about done recording an instrumental album “which was the original intention,” says Budgie, but as he flew home to Berlin just as COVID-19 was forcing the whole world into lockdown, Lol had taken the step of contacting post-punk fan James Murphy with a vague idea of him voicing on one or more of the tracks, and in those first fallow weeks of isolation, Lol put feelers out to a few other friends and admirers to see if they might also be interested.

After plunging into the unknown with their own music-making, then navigating the unplannable chicane of Coronavirus, it’s frankly a miracle that Tolhurst, Budgie and Lee came through four years later with an album so coherent and hard-hitting – about freedom and slavery, beauty and decay, hope and despair.

Pre-order Los Angeles HERE