- Music
- 05 May 21
LUMP is a collaborative project between acclaimed singer-songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay of Tunng.
LUMP have shared their first new music of the year in the form of 'Animal', the title track from their forthcoming sophomore album. The album is due for release on July 30.
The duo recorded the album at the Lindsay’s home studio in Margate, Kent, and the whole record made in much the same way as their 2018 debut. Marling would arrive in the studio without having heard any of Lindsay’s music, with the hope that it would bring the lyrics an immediacy and a spontaneity. Marling harbours a deep interest in psychoanalysis, and drew heavily on psychoanalytic texts for the album's lyrical content.
Sonically, Marling says, LUMP is “so vivid and sort of psychedelic. And the lyrics so un-thought through”.
“I was taking the train down and I had prepped by putting a glossary of words in the back of my notebook,” she says. “Ordinary words that are used differently within psychoanalysis, like ‘object’ and ‘master’; I felt I needed something to base the lyrics off. I like the idea that psychoanalysis attempts to investigate the routes of desire.
“LUMP is so the repository for so many things that I’ve had in my mind and just don’t fit anywhere in that way,” she continues. “They don’t have to totally make narrative sense, but weirdly they end up making narrative sense in some way.”
Animal was made while Marling was working on her widely acclaimed, Mercury Prize and Grammy Award nominated album Song For Our Daughter, and working on LUMP material felt liberating. “It became a very different thing about escaping a persona that has become a burden to me in some way,” she says. “It was like putting on a superhero costume.”
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'Animal' was apparently a word Marling threw into a lyric so she could meet a rhythm – the songs are full of complex time signatures. However, it captured the mood of the album as a whole.
“We created LUMP as a sort of persona and an idea and a creature,” adds Lindsay. “Through LUMP we find our inner animal, and through that animal we travel into a parallel universe.”
Watch the video for 'Animal' below.