La Luz

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Ginger Fierstein

The band La Luz in some shrubbery.

La Luz

$25 ($22 adv.).

media release: La Luz - the band led by Shana Cleveland – has dropped a new single titled “Poppies.” The baroque Sergeant Peppers-esque pop song has an air of dystopian surrealness that colors much of La Luz’s new material. The single comes on the heels of their recently announced new album, News of the Universe, out May 24. The LP marks their first for Sub Pop. Fans can pre-order the album HERE. 

La Luz’s Shana Cleveland on “Poppies”

Poppies is about the surreal feeling of going through the horror and isolation of a cancer diagnosis and treatment and then suddenly being out in the bright world again, trying to make sense of it all, feeling like I’m walking through a waking dream, seeing the first wildflowers come out and feeling a similar sense of rebirth.

With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal crisis, News of the Universe finds guitarist and songwriter Cleveland embracing a changing world with unconditional love.  News of the Universe is also a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son. 

Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.

Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the apocalypse. The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I hear on this record.”

Working with producer Maryam Qudus (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are socialized to suppress. Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most blissful. After everything, how could it not?