Our second full length album released in July 2023, encompassing a lot of introspection and a long recording schedule alongside lots of live shows tweaking our sound as we went.

We focused hard on maximising what we could do with the 3 members of the band, utilising production techniques we’d picked up over the last few years. The mixing process was long as we worked hard to develop the sound we had on ‘Happy to Be Here’, expanding the instrumentation to include radio tape loops, more saturated rhythm tracks, brass, strings and in general a more dynamic soundscape.

There are tracks on the album that were very much “studio songs”, things like the title track and ‘Over the Arctic’, which we knew we’d struggle to play live so we wrote the songs with that in mind - having an understanding that we’d not have to replicate everything live let us create some really dense tracks here. One of the earlier songs we worked on was a fully realised version of ‘Better Days’ which had been played live in various forms over the previous 2 years, with a shorter mix releasing in 2021, it was cathartic getting this recorded and finished as it sounded in my head. We spent a lot of time on the rhythm track and the general feel of the song, trying to tune in to the whole vibe.

‘Grey’ is a song I’ve been trying to get sounding right for a number of years and I feel like it fits in the album here perfectly, although it’s now entered our live set in a much different form. Recording the viola for this was really frustrating because I’m not very good at the instrument but wanted it on the track.

I remember being shocked at how many copies of this album made it across the world. We were shipping CD’s to mainland Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, just all over the place.

When it came time to mix and master the album, we had our friend Tomas work on a stem master which helped to get a lot of clarity out of the collection of songs and turn it in to an album. Our friend CJT helped us out with the artwork which was a small photograph collage he put together, the entire piece of artwork being slightly bigger than a postage stamp. Definitely my favourite album cover so far.

This era of Lucid Liars was in general a very difficult time but we’re really happy with the album and how it turned out.

Listen here now