Cait Stoddard September 9th, 2025 - 5:53 PM
Juliana Hatfield is testing her luck with the poppy, guitar driven single, “Scratchers,” which is out today, along with a video directed by Paige Applin. The track is the first release from the artist’s 21st solo album, Lightning Might Strike, which will be available December 12, through American Laundromat Records.“Scratchers” can be seen as a testament to endurance and the album itself was mostly recorded mostly in Hatfield’s house.
As for the music, the guitar riffs switches in “Scratchers” from major to minor and back again by creating a solid mood shift that is alternately optimistic and gloomy-doomy makes song’s split between the rose-tinted glasses of the gambler (you can’t win if you don’t play!) and the harsh reality of the subtext (you can’t win, you’ll never win.)
As for the album, Lightning Might Strike captures a period of major change: “It was a difficult time for me when I started working on this album. I had just uprooted myself from the city apartment building where I’d been living for twenty years to a house in a more rural town two hours away where I knew no one when one of my best friends died (‘Ashes’) and then my dog died (‘Constant Companion.)” said Hatfield.
The artist adds: “Then, my mother was diagnosed with esophagus cancer (‘Scratchers.’) I was pretty depressed for a solid year (‘Long Slow Nervous Breakdown’) and was lost and very lonely (‘Harmonizing With Myself’). I was thinking about fate and circumstance and about how I’d ended up where I was (‘Where Are You Now’).”
Lightning Might Strike Track List
