Loma — the indie trio featuring members of Shearwater and Cross Record — have announced How Will I Live Without a Body?, their first album in four years.
Ahead of the LP’s June 28 arrival on Sub Pop, the band has shared the first single, “How It Starts,” along with a video directed by and starring Loma’s Emily Cross.
The follow-up to 2020’s acclaimed Don’t Shy Away, How Will I Live Without a Body? takes its title from artificial intelligence, specifically an AI trained on the work of — with her permission — avant legend Laurie Anderson.
Anderson has frequently dabbled in AI — she worked on an AI chatbox that allowed for “conversations” with her late husband Lou Reed — as well as an AI trained on her own music and lyrics. Loma then had the AndersonAI write poems in response to two photographs they showed it.
“We used fragments of these poems in [the songs] ‘How It Starts’ and ‘Affinity’,” Loma’s Jonathan Meiburg said in a statement. “And then [band mate Dan Duszynski] noticed that one of AI-Laurie’s lines, ‘How will I live without a body?’ would be a perfect name for the album, since we’d nearly lost sight of each other in the recording process.”
“Lose sight of each other” refers to both the band’s attempts to record a follow-up to Don’t Shy Away amid the Covid pandemic and quarantines, as well as the fact that all three members were now spread across continents: Cross in the U.K., Melburg in Germany, and Duszynski remaining in the band’s native Texas. “We got lost,” Meiburg said of the initial attempts to record, “and stayed that way.”
Loma finally reconvened in England, picking up scraps from previous sessions over two weeks — and aided by a winter storm that kept them home studio-bound — and ultimately winding up with How Will I Live Without a Body?, a collection of 11 songs about “partnership, loss, regeneration, and fighting the feeling that we’re all in this alone.”
Despite the heaviness of the lyrics, “Somehow, out of the chaos, we made something that sounds very relaxed,” Cross added in a statement.
How Will I Live Without a Body? is available to preorder now via Sub Pop.
How Will I Live Without a Body? Track List
1. Please, Come In
2. Arrhythmia
3. Unbraiding
4. I Swallowed a Stone
5. How It Starts
6. Dark Trio
7. A Steady Mind
8. Pink Sky
9. Broken Doorbell
10. Affinity
11. Turnaround
