La Luz
Extra! Extra!
SUB POP

Since the release of the project’s fifth album, 2024’s News of the Universe, Shana Cleveland has assumed full control of La Luz, with previous long-term members Lena Simon and Alice Sandahl moving on to other projects. While that latest LP suggested an empty-nest syndrome in its wandering solos, a new limited-edition EP for Record Store Day Black Friday presents the project in an even starker light. Made up of reworkings of five tracks from News of the Universe, Extra! Extra! signifies a return to the sunshine rock of La Luz’s earlier years that now ripples realism into a calm midnight pool full of waning truths. Their choice of tracks establishes important themes of change, non-determinism, and free-form acceptance for the LA-via-Seattle project, and it’s only right that it feels a little lonely.

Calling in returning collaborators from News of the Universe—Audrey Johnson, Lee Paige, and Maryam Qudus, the latter of whom helped produce and engineer the project—the band headed to Tiny Telephone in Oakland to revise the tracks. Some critics have called La Luz’s work “doo-wop,” and while I find their harmonious energy compulsory and foundational to their work, I have a hard time slotting a contemporary psych-rock band from the Pacific Northwest into that category of nonsense lyricism and unfettered positivism. For as long as La Luz has fought hard, painful battles, their perspective has reflected that struggle for survival. Their work holds inside of it a notion of rapture, a constant revitalizing and diminishing of values that this EP really nurtures through stripped-down, warm harmonies of exonerated rules of life.

The recomposition of songs from an LP that holds memories of yet another changed part of Cleveland’s life seems fitting for the cycle of rebirth that constantly envelopes her work. As though a choir were singing mournfully in a large cathedral, the EP boldly and carefully writes a eulogy to its heavily toured tracks, and in doing so once again gives light to lessons learned through life’s journey. Found at the heart of these eerie falsettos and low-padding tracks is a shrine for La Luz’s sonic mastery in its most skeletal form. Inside the absence created by a reduction of noise, the unflinching choruses hint strongly toward surrender, and possibly a point of detour for future sound.

FLOOD

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La Luz, Extra! Extra!

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX

MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,
DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX