The Lumineers Preview Automatic With Two New Songs

01-29-2025

(BHM) The Lumineers share two new songs from their highly anticipated new album, Automatic: "You're All I Got" and "So Long." Automatic arrives via Dualtone worldwide on Friday, February 14.

The Lumineers' highly anticipated fifth studio album, Automatic, marks their first new collection in over three years and showcases the band at the height of their artistry. The album was introduced with the standout single "Same Old Song," which has entered the top ten at both the Alternative (#8) and AAA (#9) radio charts, cementing their continued impact on the modern music landscape.

After twenty years of musical partnership, Automatic finds Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites traveling 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 humor, and bold acknowledgments of need - for love, respect, and connection in an increasingly chaotic world.

Wesley Schultz describes the raw immediacy of "So Long", explaining, "We truly did that song live, in the moment. I think there's a magic in there, and that's what you hear coming off that track." For "You're All I Got", Schultz pushes his vocal range to its limits. He explains, "It's on the edge of where I can hit a note, so you feel that tension. When you're saying to someone, 'You're all I got,' it carries that same raw emotion." Both tracks exemplify The Lumineers' ability to channel authenticity and emotional depth into their music.

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, 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 "A**hole" and the spartan, wry "Better Day" reveal a risky intimacy and heretofore untapped undercurrent of humor, 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."