L.S. Dunes Release Highly Anticipated Sophomore Album Violet
Rock band L.S. Dunes has released their highly anticipated sophomore album Violet, out now via Fantasy Records. Featuring recent singles "Violet", "Paper Tigers", "Machines", and "Fatal Deluxe", the new album sees L.S. Dunes embracing the magic in everyday life. Fans can purchase or stream the album now here, and watch the band’s new music video "Forgiveness" here.
"The process of writing and recording this record took me someplace I’ve never been and showed me things I’ve never seen,” recalls front man Anthony Green. “There was a point where I was dead set on telling the story, but during the process of collaborating I started to realize that 'Violet' had taken all of us someplace different and showed us all different things and started to see something bigger than just my experience.”
He continues: “I will say that this record might be here to reflect back on whatever it is you go looking for in music because music is magic and magic is real. Music is magic."
On the band’s new single “Forgiveness”, Travis Stever shares: "This is a song that lived in all of us for years. We had it in us way before we even knew each other. We could only bring it to life together. Each individual brings a certain element and strength to the song that gives it its wings."
"Late one night while working on the preproduction for Past Lives Travis started finger picking these chords and it hit me like a ton of bricks, I immediately heard the whole (instrumental) song in my head,” adds Frank Iero. “We worked out most of the arrangement and instrumentation in demo form and I just knew it had the potential to be something really special. But we were brand new at working together at that point and we had a lot of songs that were coming together right before recording… and honestly, looking back I don’t think this song would have fit on Past Lives, so I’m really glad it sat and waited for us. I think it might be one of most beautiful songs I have had a hand in creating, and it really rides that line of fragility meets power that I adore."
Following a successful fall US tour, L.S. Dunes will be back on the road supporting Rise Against this February in the UK / EU.
Afterwards the band will embark on their newly announced month-long North American headline tour. The tour kicks off on April 8th, featuring From Indian Lakes, as well as Derek Zanetti, Night Sins, and Plague Vendor on select dates. Tickets and VIP packages are on-sale now and available at https://lsdunes.com/ - tour. For a full list of upcoming shows, please see below or visit https://lsdunes.com.
About L.S. Dunes:
The earliest version of L.S. Dunes—the one that introduced themselves to the world at Chicago’s Riot Fest in 2022 and went on to release their blissfully chaotic debut, Past Lives, later that year—was birthed in turbulence. There was a pandemic. There were time and family constraints. There were members away on tour with one of their many other bands: Anthony Green’s Saosin and Circa Survive, Frank Iero’s My Chemical Romance, Tim Payne and Tucker Rule’s Thursday, and Travis Stever’s Coheed and Cambria, among them. Somehow, they managed to make it work, releasing a few more singles along the way, and touring the globe for a growing and passionate cult-like fanbase. By and large, it was a successful first effort. But there were also some unforeseen consequences, and as the album cycle came to an end, there was at least one mistake that Green knew they needed to correct.
“I became so sick of playing the song where I sing, ‘Sorry that I wish that I was dead,’ and I am so sorry I even wrote that song,” he says of “Sleep Cult,” the closing track on their debut. “I’m grateful that people resonate with it, but it just wasn’t helpful for me to sing that every night or to talk about that. So this time, I personally decided that I really wanted to make a record that says there is magic in the world. I wanted to celebrate music and the transformative power that it has to connect and inspire people. I wanted to make something that was in complete opposition to that song—something that says, I want to live.” (Green)
By any measure, Violet—once again helmed by Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip—lives up to that promise, and in many ways, it opens up an opportunity to rediscover L.S. Dunes in a different light. Where Past Lives takes its oxygen from the thrill of frenzy and impulsiveness, Violet breathes deeper with a more open and expansive palette. Whether it lives in the confident and steady pulse of a song like “Machines,” in the rousing lyrical empowerment of “Paper Tigers,” or in the way that “Forgiveness” forges itself as an anthem for love and unconditional acceptance in the face of our personal failures, this is a body of work that secures multiple outcomes: There is hindsight. There is hope. There is, in fact, magic.
Perhaps no greater evidence of this exists but in the album’s name. Violet. A word that entered Iero’s subconscious while mumbling scratch lyrics to a new song he was writing, a word that became the working title for that song, and a word that survived demo after demo until it finally became the name of the album—despite not appearing anywhere in the final lyrics of the title track. “It just happened,” Iero insists. It appeared out of nowhere.
That’s the thing about magic: You need to suspend disbelief. You need to surrender to it. You need to stop asking for an explanation and simply embrace it when it comes.
