Next week on a special edition of FLOOD FM’s “Hacked,” Lord Huron presents “The Tune Tomb, a WBUB production hosted by Cliff Q,” airing at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m., and 10 p.m. PST everyday from August 11 through 15. Mark your calendar and tune in here.
Ben Schneider is surrounded by various recording equipment and a jumble of moving boxes when I speak to him from his new Craftsman-style LA home. “I’m in the middle of moving, so things are a little messy around here, but just getting in a mindset to go on tour,” notes the Lord Huron frontman shortly ahead of the release of the band’s recently released fifth LP, The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1, which was named after a malfunctioning jukebox that transports people to parallel universes. It’s something Schneider ties back to his love of The Twilight Zone and other strange sci-fi and horror tales that follow the lineage of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. Even the name of the band’s retro LA studio and “clubhouse,” Whispering Pines, sounds like an Algernon Blackwood short story.
As we chat among the clutter, Schneider recommends another horror short story collection titled The Secret of Ventriloquism as the conversation veers between the new album and how his band adapted it based on learnings from the last tour, then back to horror stories and how they inspire him. Schneider reached out to the author of this collection of interlinked short stories, Jon Padgett, and was happily surprised that the writer was interested in helping with the last Lord Huron tour. “We collaborated and wrote a few things together—on this last tour, we had an actor performing some of these little vignettes,” says Schneider. “It was really cool.”
Photography: Kevin Kerslake Cover Design: Jerome Curchod
Schneider went even deeper into speculative sci-fi and horror fiction during the making of Cosmic Selector. “The Twilight Zone and that style of fiction is a big influence on me,” he tells me. “I always pictured this cosmic selector as if you were able to be behind the controls of your life in that way. There would be some trade-off, like there would be in The Twilight Zone—some kind of Faustian bargain that you’re entering into by making those selections. So that’s something that I think comes out on the record a lot: making a choice, but not understanding the full implications of it.” Much like cosmic horror, these songs often focus on the pitifulness of humanity in the face of cosmic forces.
Lord Huron’s music has always focused on the mental trips we put ourselves through. Their folk-rock base sound with a celestial backdrop is spread out like a cosmic map where each star represents something in between life and death. The dread of an entropic universe and mankind’s curiosity have kept the band’s fanbase busy speculating for years, with Cosmic Selector certainly being no exception. Are “Bag of Bones” and “The Comedian” all about Whispering Pines’ in-universe juggling clown, Booboo Slippers? What exactly is going on at the television network WBUB with its strange “news, weather, sports, and the secret truths of the cosmos, coming at you across time and space from who knows where”? Schneider won’t reveal too much, since he prefers keeping the mystery alive. “There’s a good relationship between beauty and mystery on this album, and we like to keep it open,” says the songwriter.
“I always pictured this cosmic selector as if you were able to be behind the controls of your life. There would be some trade-off, like there would be in The Twilight Zone—some kind of Faustian bargain that you’re entering into by making those selections.”
It’s a style of storytelling that’s shimmered in the moonless corners of the LA band’s lore-rich discography since the group’s 2012 debut, Lonesome Dreams, an indie rock record that keeps you on your toes as it flips through genres and moods. Schneider grew up in Michigan and went to school for art, with his work visible throughout Lord Huron’s discography, website, and merch. “I guess my musical introduction was mostly through my family,” he remembers. “My parents were big into music—not professional musicians or anything, just fans. They’d always be playing stuff in the house. We’d take long car trips up to the northern part of Michigan in a station wagon. Back then people were a little more lax about seat belts, and I would just roll around in the back rows with my brothers and sisters listening to whatever my parents had on at the time.”
That feeling of nostalgia and escaping to nature popped up on the band’s second album, 2015’s Strange Trails, which launched the group into a whole different trajectory when it achieved certified triple platinum status, largely pushed by the melancholic waltz “The Night We Met” after it appeared in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why in 2017. Thanks to TikTok virality, the track has since defied the normal single shelf life by becoming more popular every year. Lord Huron has since made a career out of mining the depths of regret and past relationships on 2018’s “blown to shit” garage-rock bumper Vide Noir and 2021’s ghostly folk-rocker Long Lost, but “The Night We Met” is a cornerstone song for the band, to be sure.
“There’s a good relationship between beauty and mystery on this album, and we like to keep it open.”
Continuing in the tradition of sliding-door moments such as the one born from their biggest song, Schneider was primarily interested in butterfly effects on Cosmic Selector. You can hear it immediately on the harp-led “Looking Back” and the rambling Spaghetti Western jaunt “Bag of Bones.” The album’s bedeviled jukebox has a life of its own, resulting from an “incredible” recording experience according to Cosmic Selector’s producer/mixer Matthew Neighbour, who’s previously worked with Cold War Kids, The Avalanches, Danny Brown, and Sky Ferreira. “What started off as Ben and I just producing one song together snowballed into me jumping on board to help finish a few other songs the band had recorded at Whispering Pines,” he shares. “We finished producing the whole album together.”
Neighbour notes that the process for the new record was smooth from initial demos to finished product. “Ben always brings in such great demos, so a lot of our time would be spent finding the best collection of sounds, textures, and performances to bring the arrangements to life,” he continues. “Then, once the foundation was there, we’d get into some experimentation.” Case in point, the chorus for “Fire Eternal” is crackling with classic Lord Huron conversational phrases, and the guitar licks are immaculate throughout the whole track. Schneider and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino sing together on the chorus, and the vocals glow like embers of a perishing campfire deep within Whispering Pines.
The moody album artwork for The Cosmic Selector was painted by the London-based artist Andrew McIntosh, another figure who, like Padgett, Schneider managed to connect with by chance. “Someone sent me his paintings from a show he did a couple of years ago, and I ended up buying one. I loved it so much. I had this idea for this record cover in my head for a long time. I’m a painter as well, so initially I was planning to tackle it, but I kind of knew the style I wanted wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse.”
While on tour, Schneider visited McIntosh’s studio and talked it through. “He made two beautiful paintings, one on the cover and one on the inside gatefold. He’s just a really talented guy. It’s beautiful stuff.” The eerie imagery captures that strangeness of a foreboding forest scene mixed with an unhinged magical jukebox. Schneider wanted to convey a mysterious quality for the artwork depicting the album’s wrinkle-in-time production methodology.
Miguel Briseño, Lord Huron’s longtime bassist, keyboardist, and theremin player, likens the band’s process to stitching together pieces of fabric that only begin to fit once you start to rework them from new angles. Most of the band members were entering new phases of life with young children, so their studio time had to be in short spurts over a longer period. “The making of CSV1 was a journey,” Briseño notes via email. “The process felt familiar yet foreign, precise at times and disjointed in others—basically a real creative challenge. This was a big learning experience for us. In each chapter of Lord Huron, we’ve found new ways to grow and evolve and new ways to work together—I don’t expect that to change in the future. It’s a special thing to be able to go through these seasons in life with a group of guys that understand and support each other while still, you know, living our dreams.”
“I’m just so thankful we didn’t have to go through all the growing pains that a lot of young bands have to go through. We weren’t getting to know each other. We’d already gone through it all.”
Schneider also reflects on the phases of the band’s collaboration and how it all could’ve been very different. “We’ve been collaborating in some cases since we were 12 years old, which is just crazy. It’s not like we’ve been going the whole time. We had our time apart, living our own lives, and then came back together forming this band around 2010—so 15 years doing it this way.” When Schneider was starting the band, he’d released a couple of recordings himself and was just trying to find a way to do it live. “I’m just so thankful we didn’t have to go through all the growing pains that a lot of young bands have to go through—on the road in particular,” he reflects. “We weren’t getting to know each other. We’d already gone through it all and knew what annoyed us about each other. We knew what we loved about each other. We knew when to step away, how to talk to each other, how to be real with each other.”
Cosmic Selector’s “Nothing I Need” confronts this subject of looking back at your life and all the time you spent on the road as a musician or career man with a surrealistic cautionary tale wrapped in country-rock garments. Schneider’s lyrics smash-cut to a bewildering scene: “You open your eyes one day and you’re old.” The album overall has a lot to do with looking at key moments of your life and wondering, “What could have been different?” It’s the reconciling and wrestling with your past, present, and future that spins most people into outer space like a true cosmic horror story. The vastness of outer space can make you feel small, but so can your mind as you second-guess yourself into oblivion.
On the road-weary “Nothing I Need,” Schneider sings over an acoustic guitar some destabilizing lines: “I said goodbye to my youth, and my blood ran cold / I’ve got a feeling I just had to get away / I left it all behind on an endless road / But I see her face everywhere I go / I got everything I want, and I got nothing that I need.” What comes next is a freaky scene as the band starts to ramp up in energy, and the theremin and banjo start hitting the open stretch of a desert hellscape. A siren with long black hair and an “ice-cold stare” makes a man wish he’d never let her go. The music video for the track has that otherworldly starkness that you see in horror movies—or perhaps, more accurately, a David Lynch film.
Schneider tends to gravitate to the idea of finding beauty in ambiguity, which was inherent in the many weird tales that started to be published in horror magazines after World War I. “There was a lot of searching on this record,” he recalls, eyes drifting up to the ceiling like two balloons. “Some of the songs were cut multiple times. We kept things from some sessions and not others, and I don’t think I knew at the time exactly what I was looking for. I think it was this feeling of fragmentary collage, which is sort of how it ended up being built—which was very different from our last record, Long Lost, which is very much about nostalgia.”
“There was a lot of searching on this record... I don’t think I knew at the time exactly what I was looking for.”
The intangible feelings Schneider gets from listening to his favorite bands from high school, like Blonde Redhead and Hum, were mixed with old-guard country for Cosmic Selector: George Jones, Hank Williams, and Lee Hazlewood. Country music tends to be connected to outer space a lot more than other types of music—it’s the vast open-road genre. “Mystery and beauty are just like twins,” he argues. “I think the best music finds a way to express that. And music itself, just as an art form, is so mysterious by its nature. It seems to be hardwired into us to appreciate and to react to, and to want to express ourselves that way. I think that we’re in a world where mystery seems to be being stamped out in some ways.”
That mystery is apparent on Cosmic Selector’s bass-led country single “Used to Know,” where time is running backward, and the song’s subject is stuck in a graveyard where he sees a ghost of himself from an alternate dimension. Schneider sings the chorus in a higher register, as if a ghost has taken over his body: “If I ever come back from the graveyard / Tell me I remind you of someone you used to know.” The track joins several that play within the shadows and dissipate like cobwebs as soon as you start to pick them apart too much. A few songs prior, “Watch Me Go” unfolds in the grand tradition of country songs where the protagonist is walking away from past mistakes. Schneider sings about a Faustian bet: “I got a phantom pain that never fades away / I made a deal with the devil but I never got paid.”
Among the album’s biggest highlights, though, is “Who Laughs Last?,” an intergalactic collaboration with actress Kristen Stewart. Schneider notes that the track actually originated as prose until he started hearing a beat behind it. “I tried to do a song version of it, and I was thinking it just needs to be a spoken-word thing,” he notes. He initially recorded a demo himself, but thought it would be more engaging if it were a female voice. Ben’s wife, Sacha Schneider, did the original vocal lines, and he was happy with that, but he’d been watching Stewart’s movies and managed to connect with her. Schneider liked how it turned out so much that he’d want to make a full short-story album with music like “Who Laughs Last?” in the future.
The Cosmic Selector jukebox will be appearing on stage with Lord Huron throughout the rest of the year, providing a unique perspective on the nature of nostalgia. The tour is already turning out to be an immersive journey of music, light, and old film snippets—so much so that it verges into a vision quest of deep reds and moody blues. The band usually performs for almost two hours with a few breaks to address the audience. Schneider wants it to feel natural, even in the bigger arenas. “There’s something about the way we perform that I feel like there’s a real interplay between us—our energy on stage and the energy in the audience—and, more importantly, the emotion. We’re just trying to find creative ways to maintain that on this bigger scale.” Schneider won’t reveal too many details of the show, but he always wants to avoid the “exhibit behind glass” feeling for any Lord Huron gig.
“Mystery and beauty are just like twins. I think the best music finds a way to express that.”
The new album is a moment suspended in time, and just the beginning of new parallel side narratives for Lord Huron fans to pick apart for years to come. Will The Cosmic Selector turn out to be a multi-volume collection? Schneider isn’t ruling it out for now. “Maybe I can’t go too much into it since it’s top secret, but yeah, you certainly would think it suggested that there’d be more volumes,” he ponders. “But look at Dylan with Chronicles: Volume One. I don’t know if number two is ever coming. I hope it does. If Bob does it, we’ll do it.”
Lord Huron’s final line on The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 before it whirs to a stop is a fitting end for a cosmic horror tale bathed in country-rock stage lights: “Well, do what you must / In the end, we all turn to dust / And I’ll stay forever right here if you want me to.” We’re all just space dust in the end, so let’s enjoy ourselves in the meantime. FL
