Juliana Hatfield Shares Shares 'Scratchers' Video

09-09-2025

(TP) Juliana Hatfield is testing her luck with the poppy, guitar driven single "Scratchers" out today along with a video directed by Paige Applin. It's the first release from her 21st solo album Lightning Might Strike, available December 12th via American Laundromat Records.

The song can be seen as a testament to endurance ("I've always had a feeling/that I was born to win") and the album itself, recorded mostly in Juliana's house, by Juliana, was two years in the making.

This riff switches, in "Scratchers", from major to minor and back again, creating a pendulating mood shift, alternately optimistic and gloomy-doomy, befitting the 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).

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'), 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')."

Joining Juliana (guitar, keyboards, vocals, percussion, bass) on this album journey were Chris Anzalone (drums), Ed Valauskas (bass) and Pat DiCenso (mix/mastering).

Lightning Might Strike is available for pre-order along with limited edition vinyl and bundles. It will be available on American Laundromat Records on December 12, 2025.