Album Review: Lukas Graham - 'Good Times'
Lukas Graham finally picks up a phone call his father made thirty years ago.
Some albums move forward. Good Times goes back, and what Lukas Graham finds there is a Rolodex full of his late father's friends. Eugene Graham spent his life booking folk and bluegrass musicians through Scandinavia, and this record is Lukas tracking down the surviving names on that list, Michael McGoldrick, Sam Grisman, Tim O'Brien, Stuart Duncan, Brian Sutton, and asking them to finish a conversation his dad started. The title track opens things as an outright banger, loose and celebratory enough that it puts you somewhere specific before the first verse even ends. Hard to hear it and not think of your own version of a good time.
From there, every song earns its own moment. "Second Chance" doesn't announce itself so much as build into one, starting hesitantly before the rhythm catches up to the idea underneath it: refusing to waste an opportunity twice. "Before You Go" goes the other way entirely, stripped to almost nothing, a story told rather than sung, patient enough to make you sit with it. "To Know a Girl" does the same lyrically, painting someone so specifically you can picture her by the second verse, every line sounding like a man who knows exactly how lucky he is.
The sequencing knows exactly when to move and when to idle, and it never wastes a transition. "Freetown Road" is windows-down music, no destination required. "River Run" turns that same restlessness defiant, alone but moving forward anyway, the tempo climbing right alongside the resolve in the lyric until you're inside the song instead of just hearing it.
Then the record's emotional core lands in a run that's hard to overstate. "Falling" is a promise dressed up as a song, someone swearing they'll catch you before you hit the ground. "Carry Me Home" strips even that distance away, close enough that it plays like someone sitting next to you rather than a recording. "Days Like These" is the cleverest bit of writing here, an upbeat arrangement wrapped around a genuinely tender admission that nobody warns you what the hard days actually feel like, and somehow that honesty makes it feel even warmer.
"Rich Man" is the album's thesis in miniature, a song about a kind of wealth that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with who you get to come home to, and it might be the most quietly perfect three minutes on the record. Then comes "Nights I Won't Forget," barely forty seconds long, and it works precisely because it doesn't overstay itself: less a full song than a voice memo left behind in the middle of the night, gone before you're ready to let go of it, which somehow makes it linger longer than tracks four times its length. "Last Mile" closes the arc on something close to hope, a reminder that you rarely know where the road ends, only that you keep walking it anyway.
It closes on "Loved You Better," maybe the most affecting song here, a confession of every broken promise and a vow to do better tomorrow. Bookending the record with "Good Times" and "Loved You Better" is masterful sequencing: euphoria on the way in, a reckoning on the way out, and everything soulful in between.
Thirteen songs deep, there isn't a single one that plays like filler, which is genuinely rare for a record this personal. Every track feels lived-in, specific, and generous with the listener, the kind of album that rewards you more the closer you actually listen. It's the sound of an artist finally writing exactly the record he was always circling.
Words by Dhriti Duggal
