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LUCIDBLOOM

LUCIDBLOOM covered in rainbows

Dream-pop collective LUCIDBLOOM have steadily been honing their craft, combining lush vocal harmonies with shimmering guitars, cinematic textures and driving rhythms. The Sydney-based, femme-fronted group are entering a new phase, fuelled by rapid fire creative bursts, a new lineup, and a willingness to embrace their own vulnerability.

Their forthcoming EP channels grief, connection and realisation, and they’ve collaborated with a number of mixed-media artists to create immersive experiences both live and in the studio. In the interview to follow, we explore their evolving sound, the role that collaboration plays in their art, and what emotional undercurrents inspire their music.

LUCIDBLOOM in red lighting

For new listeners discovering you: how would you introduce LUCIDBLOOM, and how has your recent lineup change shaped the way you write and sound today?

LUCIDBLOOM are a femme-fronted dream pop collective - think lush vocal harmonies and cinematic soundscapes. We’re diving into the new evolution of our sound since our last EP, which has really built upon these dynamics and locking in on more driving rhythms, shimmering and ephemeral guitars and bigger beats. We’re aiming to hit that nerve between nostalgia, melancholy and processing what makes us human. 

Our process has really shifted this year, and we’ve tapped into a much more organic process together writing and producing this latest body of work. We focus our creative time in rapid fire sessions for 2-3 hours, where it’s created a microcosm that is just full to the brim with ideas and bouncing off each other. It’s a special kind of high when your disparate ideas connect to make something new, and it’s allowed us to experiment more and hone in on our sound in this new phase. 

Your music so far has often blended elements of dream-pop, shoegaze, atmospherics and pop hooks. How do you decide which direction to lean into on a song and what guides the balance?

With our latest works it’s been less of a conscious decision because the sound flows pretty naturally, and our writing style is very open, supportive and intuitive. We’ve fostered a space where everyone feels super comfortable trying out ideas and adding to each other’s developing concepts - it might sound silly but we rarely labour over anything - it tends to flow and sometimes we’re shocked at how quickly things click into place. There’s so much trust between us that lets everyone be vulnerable as a creator. As lyricists, we (Jen and Kat) are sisters with a very close relationship, so speaking about raw ideas and themes is easy. Moulding our common personal experiences into songs is a really nice way to work through things - there’s a distinct will for people to relate to and identify their own relevant experiences in the songs. 

And musically as a band, we all bring diverse experiences to the mix across dark synth pop, indie rock and even acapella choirs, that have naturally weaved their way together into the overall sound and into our writing processes together.

A lot of your earlier work draws from your environment, especially the Blue Mountains area west of Sydney and the dramatic natural landscapes. How does your setting influence your creative process now?

Probably the biggest change in influence and environment is the setting in which the songs have been created. The first songs moved slowly. Longer days of writing and recording in the Mountains - long lunches - but overall less frequent moments of connection. We’re all professionals, some of us parents, and we have many competing demands (who doesn’t!) so now we meet for short bursts of creativity in a much more restricted space and time but much more frequently. We find this environment (the back of a converted truck in Marrickville) is really conducive for writing and it’s been super productive. We’re not overthinking things - we're trialling in real time and letting ourselves explore personal and collective experiences.

Almost nothing gets left behind in the cutting room - we’ve turned almost everything we’ve experimented with into something. Our methods have evolved and we’re all finding these frequent but short creative bursts are mentally sustainable, energised and healthy. If you’ve had a shit day you can literally turn it around with 90 minutes of satisfying music making with people you love!

There is always a thematic undercurrent of pressure, calamity and the general discord of the world that influences many of the concepts we explore, but we make time and space to channel that into something meaningful during writing.

DUST album cover

Collaboration seems important in your creative universe: producers, mastering, visual artists. Who are you working with this time, and in what ways are collaborators helping shape the new record?

We worked closely with lighting and installation artist SIRC_UIT during the first EP release, across both live shows and music videos, and it allowed us to drive how our music and visuals intertwined to create a more immersive experience of the music. 

This time around we’re broadening out further on our visual collaborations, and working with a range of emerging local artists we admire. We’ve worked with Bee Elton, who handpainted on our new press photos, Alexandre Felix who built AI dream landscape artworks from before AI was readily available and used - like coded artifacts of a very specific time in technology shifting. Now with our current release for ‘Dust’ we’re collaborating with digital and multi-media artist Naomi Oliver whose practice uses data bending and corruption to create a distinct visual aesthetic in film and motion works. We’ve found a real thematic connection with Naomi’s work - she makes beautiful mistakes with data emphasizing the fragility of digital existence and alluding to the precariousness of many aspects of human experience: such as relationships, physical bodies, material objects, and so on. Our songs are also grappling with the ephemeral nature of existence - there’s songs about grief and loss, about the intensity of human connection, and also the liberation of letting go of situations or relationships that no longer serve us.

While we’ve always been passionate about maintaining a cohesive visual aesthetic as much as our sound, it’s important for us to keep exploring different visual collaborations that we feel resonate with the music we’re making, and the evolutions of our work.

Lyrically, your songs have dealt with themes like connection, loss, liminal spaces and emotional rawness. What personal or existential questions are at the core of this new record?

The new songs came about during some significant personal upheaval. There’s a spectrum of things you feel when you lose something intrinsic to who you are that you assumed would always be there. Loss moves in and around and beyond devastation.

It’s the white hot, searing disorientation of fresh grief (Aftermath), it’s a technicolor sunset that fills you to the brim with love, longing, sadness, hope (Fever Dream), it’s the realisation of what’s really important in life and letting go of the heavy things that no longer serve you (Dust), and it’s the disassociation and masking that you are forced to instigate to survive another day pretending everything is normal without publicly screaming into the abyss (Coexist). Things hurt and it’s all because of love. But nothing truly prepares you. Nobody knows how to navigate this well so we’re really just grappling with what it means to be human.

Dust - Video Teaser

Your visuals and live show aesthetic are immersive. For someone who hasn’t seen you live yet, how do you want audiences to feel when they see a LUCIDBLOOM performance?

We want it to feel all encompassing. Something you can step into sonically and visually, and feel connected throughout. There are moments of darkness and light, and wherever possible we try to reflect this with the visual experience through installations and billowing smoke. Sometimes, where installation or venues can’t accommodate, we try to carry this through in the intimacy of the performance and take people along on the wave with us. 

What was the spark for your latest single Aftermath? Can you walk readers through one song’s journey from the first idea to the finished recording?

Aftermath is really a song about grief and how there are moments in life where the ground falls away from underneath you. We captured that feeling through imagery of a landscape in collapse and a particular kind of surreal that takes over when your brain can’t process what is happening. The song started with a few guitar riffs and the vocal harmony fell into place fairly quickly - we knew what we were writing about - we really spoke openly and it was a particularly emotional process. The song is a reflection of the intensity of love and loss, and searching for a safe place to land. 

Sonically, this was a bridge between old and new - it’s got the dynamics, rising and falling instrumentation, the harmonies and melancholia. But it’s also much more personal than previous materials. The key parts of the song came together in demo form in two hours as a stream of consciousness, the rest was revisiting structural components, re-recording components, getting all the vocal layers sorted (this usually takes an entire day), and then finding the right mix engineer that we thought would understand the assignment and treat this track with the intensity and care it needed.

LUCIDBLOOM in red lights with blue background

When you’re writing, are there sounds or influences you’re excited to explore? Maybe elements you haven’t used before?

We have really leaned in to playing into everyone’s strengths, and there is complete trust in the experience everyone brings to the table that continues to shape our sound. We’re all very aligned in influences that inspire us, and the direction we want to move in, and in particular we have been pushing the boundaries of electronic components and layers in our live show that are new to the mix for us. 

Our drummer Asti, is an incredible musical director and has amplified the way we experiment and collaborate together. She’s got a real sense of setting up the perfect starting points for our sessions, whether it’s a chord, a beat idea or a synth sound, that we re-interpret and build worlds around together. 

That is a real skill in songwriting - stopping yourself at a small idea or concept and then seeing how we can colour that in as a group, knowing everyone will bring their specialty to the table. It’s a bit like finding the first ingredient and then finding the best matching ingredients or chemical reactions to bring a song to completion. 

Working on a new body of work often forces difficult choices. What was a creative decision in this new EP that pushed you outside of your comfort zone?

We’ve been really lucky throughout the creation of this next EP, that there’s been no difficulties in terms of development or alignment for collaborative and creative decisions. We’ve all reflected on how it’s been the most streamlined and positive creation experience we’ve all been a part of, and it’s come together as a cohesive work that has been both beautiful and heartbreaking to explore as a body of work. 

The difficult choices, as with many independent musicians, are often financial. In times where artists need to be able to do everything themselves, and invest in every aspect from producing, recording, mixing, rehearsing, releasing, promoting your work, producing merch, and going on tour when costs all round have increased exponentially, it can be a challenge to invest in every aspect to do it all justice. So we all jump in to pick up many of the parts ourselves, and we are strategic when it comes to investing in the right things at the right time. We make very conscious decisions around the releases, videos, creative collaborations and performances to be able to highlight work we feel will resonate the most. 

It’s also been a driving reason we’ve decided so far to release in small batches across EPs when the work feels ready to share with the world and we can package up pieces of the story.

Our plan after the busy release schedule and next run of shows will be to tackle a full album, which is a challenge we’re really excited to jump into together. 

LUCIDBLOOM with colorful projections

What’s one thing you hope people take away from your upcoming record, emotionally, atmospherically, or conceptually?

It’s ok to feel things. It’s ok to fall apart, it’s ok to let go. It’s ok. In a way we’re all in this together - we all have to feel the depths of all the beautiful parts and all the parts that hurt.

For someone hearing you for the first time via Denon+ (or seeing you live), which tracks would you point them to as the best introduction — from your past and the new work — to get the full LUCIDBLOOM experience?

Dust is a track we are really excited to release - it’s pointing in a new direction for the band. It feels lighter and more focused, but there’s an empowerment to that song that really marks a new beginning for us.

From the past material Mutual Gravity is still a fave - both of these songs are about relationships and how heavy or light they can be if you are able to make the right decision. Do I let this drag me into the depths? Or do I roll it off a ledge and let it go…they both have a groove that is undeniable and play with the push and pull of finding balance both conceptually and sonically.


LUCIDBLOOM releases their new music video for Dust on October 1st. You can find them on Spotify, Instagram and Facebook. 

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