The Lumineers Announce Fifth Studio Album ‘Automatic’ Out Next Month
Today, The Lumineers proudly announce their eagerly awaited new album, Automatic, available via Dualtone Records, an MNRK Company, on Friday, 14 February. Pre-orders are available now.
The 2x GRAMMY® Award-nominated and chart-topping band’s fifth studio album and first new collection in more than three years, Automatic, is heralded by the exhilarating first single, Same Old Song, available everywhere now. True to form, the track, like the rest of the album, was written by co-founders Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites. Being among the few top groups who write all their own material is, says Schultz, “a unique badge of honour.”
“This album marks 20 years of songwriting between Jeremiah and me,” says Wesley Schultz. “The album explores some of the absurdities of the modern world, like the increasingly blurry line between what’s real and what’s not, and the variety of ways we numb ourselves while trying to combat both boredom and overstimulation.”
A speedy chronicle of misadventures showcasing The Lumineers’ undeniable flair for a soaring rave-up, Same Old Song is joined by an official music video featuring Schultz and Fraites performing in front of a living canvas where scenes play out like VHS home movies, creating a morphing collage of moments that feel both immediate and remote. The projections provide a surreal, mysterious window into the mind and memories of The Lumineers, visually manifesting the song’s emotionally resonant lyrics. Directed by filmmaker Anaïs LaRocca (Hundred Waters), Same Old Song premieres today.
After twenty years of musical partnership, Automatic finds Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz travelling new sonic and thematic terrain with their most raw and personal collection thus far. Both men, now dads, fully embraced the life-altering, unromantic challenges and rewards of family life. When they reconvened to write, the emerging songs featured a new, aching vulnerability, sly humour, and bold acknowledgements of need – for love, respect, and connection in an increasingly chaotic world.
Inspired by Peter Jackson’s 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, the band, with the help of co-producers David Baron and Simone Felice, set up shop in the expansive tracking room at Woodstock’s Utopia Studio. Multiple set-ups – with two sets of drums, three different pianos, and an array of amps, guitars, and vocal mics – were laid out, allowing the musicians to pivot and capture as much as possible with minimal delay. The process further freed The Lumineers to perform the songs as a unit, allowing the band to capture the raw, organic presentation of the anthemic new tracks. For the first time on a Lumineers album, the band is credited as co-producers alongside Felice and Baron, who also engineered and mixed, as he did on the band’s last two albums.
Recorded in less than a month, the album, as Schultz says, feels “very much of this era.” While songs like the self-effacing Asshole and the spartan, wry Better Day reveal a risky intimacy and heretofore untapped undercurrent of humour, Automatic remains what fans around the world have come to love about The Lumineers – shadowy themes wrapped in upbeat, infectious melodies, sky-high choruses destined to be sung by tens of thousands each night on the road, and what Fraites calls “a palpable sense of connection between Wes and me. There’s lots of love on this record.”
Automatic track list:
Same Old Song
Asshole
Strings
Automatic
You’re All I’ve Got
Plasticine
Ativan
Keys On The Table
Better Day
Sunflowers
So Long
