Genre-defying Berliners Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys return with their latest exploration of sound in ‘Pale Bloom,’ an intense yet intimate seventh record.

Stream: ‘Pale Bloom’ – Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><a href="https://lucykruger.bandcamp.com/album/pale-bloom">Pale Bloom by Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys</a>

**A blazing, brooding haze washes over the entirety of Pale Bloom, the seventh record from Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys.**

The Berlin-based band, fronted by South African musician Lucy Kruger, has been active for just over a decade, especially across Europe since Kruger’s move to Germany in 2018. With slight variations of Lost Boys throughout the years, the current lineup features Liú Mottes (guitar), Jean-Louise Parker (strings/vocals), Gidon Carmel (drums), and Reuben Kemp (bass).

Pale Bloom - Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys — Pale Bloom – Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys

The album comes nearly two years after 2024’s A Human Home, which itself was a sonic outlier in their collection with its experimental, lo-fi tracks. Written during lockdown, its demo-adjacent songs chronicle intimacy and isolation. It features voice memos from friends and collaborators alike, bedroom recordings, spoken word, and some of Kruger’s rawest songwriting. It’s predecessor, 2023’s Heaving, was flush with fresh, fast-paced energy and visceral sonics navigating a heavy, confident soundscape previously unseen in their discography.

The five-piece, along co-producer André Leo, have dissected the very best elements of their previous two LPs to birth the 11-track collection without falling into the trap of stale repetition. Pale Bloom is without a doubt their most sonically intriguing work to date with its exceptional use of instrumentation, production, and playful experimentation. The use of viola somberly poised among percussion, layered guitar, and textured noise proves a key element in the curation of the darker soundscape. Be wary getting too comfortable with their sound – I’m confident they’ve already prepped the studio for their next batch of sonic exploration.

Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys © Francis Broek

Distorted nursery rhyme “Bloom” sets the heavier, introspective tone of the album: “If you came to me and mirrored all my nothing / What would I do / What would you choose?” A tender ode to Virginia Woolf twists, turns, and transforms as a gritty, electronic fog envelopes all in its wake – thick, consuming, and well worth the wait (“Woolf”). Gothic art-pop intensifies with a burning passion – restrained just as smoothly as it’s released – as Kruger’s crescendoing shouts rise in waves over Carmel’s crashing cymbals and Mottes’ staticky strings (“Ambient Heat”).

Steamy seductiveness brought on by Kruger’s signature low voice seeps out as she reaches for connection yet remains unable to fully speak her intended truth.

My words are caught
in the dryness of my mouth
There must be a damper place
to let it all come out

I don’t know
the force it takes
Is it love
or a godly state
To give it up to you
a gift a body cruel

-“Damp,” Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys

Through soft, breathy vocals and slips of her accent, she punchily exclaims, “I’ve got a breakdown scheduled in the basement / Baby won’t you take me there.” Wavering just on the verge of confession, the controlled chaos calms as Kruger and instrumentation slip away, allowing background vocals to swell in sync with viola (both courtesy of Parker).

Select any song from their collection and you’re immediately portaled into a dreary, warped dimension – as if peering at the rippled reflection of yourself in the water pooled at your feet. Which version of yourself stares back? Who reaches out? Kruger’s anxieties have dug their way deep into the band’s core, having been lyrically regurgitated album and album again. Songs are constantly caught in the in-between; of noise and silence, of anger and despair, of a desire to be known yet the refusal to let anyone in. “Ghosts” finds her begging her partner not to leave but maybe she’s the only one who’s pushing away. But hey, it’s not all so depressing. She clearly has a sense of humor: “Just an hour a day to keep the demons at bay / Doesn’t that sound like a romantic getaway?”

Don’t get it twisted, vulnerability doesn’t necessarily equate to finger-picked acoustics or piano ballads (though those certainly can be found within the band’s Tapes trilogy of albums). Kruger illuminates just how intimate the noise can be; you can physically feel the songs are meant to breathe, pant, and heave in the live space. Performance acts as the final, or perhaps first, part of the art itself. Kruger herself unravels the second she steps on stage – singing, shrieking, and staring deeply. Her intense, signature locked-on gaze pierces right through you. Every syllable, sigh, and sliver of sound escaping her mouth tastes like poetry. You’re left desperately teetering on the edge, grasping onto the soundwaves, begging her to hold her gaze just a second more.

Kruger and her band keep reinventing themselves time and time again… who’s to say which sonic territory they’ll dive into next? Being their seventh LP, the record has a heavy history to live up to. That being said, Pale Bloom is certainly their latest work of genius.

— —