LUMP - 'Animal'
LUMP, project of Laura Marling and Lindsay, release their captivating new single ‘Animal’.
Animal is synth-y, ambient, catchy, groovy, soft, powerful and abstract in all the ways I dream of when I wait patiently for new music from LUMP. The outfit consists of Laura Marling & Mike Lindsay of Tunng and the pair have just announced their second album will be out this summer, alongside this mesmerising new single that shares the name of the album.
The track opens with rhythmic drums and glitchy distorted synth hooks in which Marling overlays her sweet dulcet tones that are signature to her style, with rhythmic and repetitive lyrics taking us into a hypnotic and dreamy state. After the first chorus there is a breakdown section which transports us somewhere abstract and polar opposite to everything else in the song. The groove halts to allow us to take a breath and suddenly we’re drenched in angelic choral harmonies, that make us feel like all the gravity has vanished from the room for that fleeting moment, before we’re dropped right back into the familiar groove sending us back into our trance and aura of tranquility.
The sound of LUMP lives in a totally different universe to either Laura or Mikes other projects, but somehow still draws in fans from those worlds with something magical and sonically reminiscent. In the creative process of writing the album, Lindsay writes the music and Marling arrives at his home studio in Margate to write the lyrics having never heard the pieces. This allows for her to not overthink the meaning and write whatever the music inspires at that time.
The title of the track and album ‘Animal’ was originally laid down to hold the rhythmic idea but the pair felt it perfectly captured not only the song, but the idea of the band itself. “There’s a little bit of a theme of hedonism on the album, of desires running wild,” she Marling. “And also it fed into the idea we had from the start of thinking of LUMP as a kind of representation of instincts, and the world turned upside down”. “We created LUMP as a sort of persona and an idea and a creature,” says Lindsay. “Through LUMP we find our inner animal, and through that animal we travel into a parallel universe.”
Words by Tamara Grzegorzek