Laura Marling and Tunng frontman Mike Lindsay’s project LUMP announced their sophomore album Animal will be released on July 30 via Chrysalis/Partisan Records. They also shared a new video for the title track from the album.
“Animal” is an upbeat indie-electronica track with a catchy synth hook. It begins with Marling’s nearly monotone vocals, “Hair on the pillow/Blood on the shirt/Pieces of love/Traces of dirt,” but moves into a more melodic chorus after the song builds up to it. While generally more energetic than the songs from their debut album LUMP (2018), it still has moments where the beat drops out and Marling’s vocals seem more vulnerable.
The video, directed by Melissa Matos, shows Marling and Lindsay dressed in all white in a corporate-looking white room with large windows, which the credits say was in a church hall in Peckham, UK. It’s mostly an aesthetic-defined music video thanks to the colors, the inflatable tubing they crawl inside of, and the straw packaging that falls on them. It’s an expansion of the footage they used when teasing new music earlier this week.
“‘Animal’ was a word Laura Marling threw into a lyric simply to meet a rhythm,” LUMP’s website states. “But it seemed to capture the mood of the new record, and of LUMP as a whole.” Marling adds, “There’s a little bit of a theme of hedonism on the album, of desires running wild. 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.”
Lindsay agrees, “We created LUMP as a sort of persona and an idea and a creature. Through LUMP we find our inner animal, and through that animal we travel into a parallel universe.” The website explains that they see it as something “childlike and grotesque and filled with possibility.” There is also some merch available on the website, including vinyl, cassettes, mugs, candles, totes, shirts and underwear.
Animal will be the follow-up to LUMP, which they previously stated had been inspired by absurdist poets like Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler, as well as early-20th-century surrealism as a whole. LUMP is a collection of songs that deals with thoughts about the absurdity of individualism, and explores how people cultivate public personas to escape from meaninglessness and mundanity. The album was critically acclaimed, and features some of the duo’s more popular singles like “Curse of the Contemporary,” “Late to the Flight” and “May I Be the Light.”
Both Marling and Lindsay have released new music for their individual projects since then. Tunng’s last album was Tunng – Dead Club. Marling’s 2020 album Song for Our Daughter wound up being one of her most successful albums to date, and made it into mxdwn’s Top 10 Best Albums of 2020.
Animal Tracklist:
1. Bloom at Night
2. Gamma Ray
3. Climb Every Wall
4. Animal
5. Red Snakes
6. Hair on the Pillow
7. Paradise
8. We Cannot Resist
9. Oberon
10. Phantom Limb
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