LYR’s ‘The Ultraviolet Age’ with Hockney-inspired track…

Providing an era-defining document of an intense period of human existence and offering wryly celebratory pen pictures of shared experience and moments of curios found along the way, Simon Armitage, Richard Walters and Patrick J Pearson’s LYR release their second album, The Ultraviolet Age today. Finally revealing all ten-tracks of the striding, complex and genre-fluid follow up to their 2020 debut album, Call In The Crash Team, LYR draw attention to Hockney Red on release day, a prime, sample-rich example of their borderless experimentation with the human voice, lyrical formulae and curated electronics.

LYR’s coherence as a band with live experience and a deeper, collective commitment to seeking out exquisite sound, while probing what the possibilities might be for a band that combines the spoken, the sung, the played and the programmed, provides key points of difference between the collective’s charming debut and pristine follow-up. With moments of serendipity as welcome as moments of purpose, Hockney Red’s vibrant celebration of vivid colour and naive teen experimentation was inspired by a momentary encounter with the work of the renowned British artist referenced in the song’s title.

Spooling out from a simple, open question – to respond to one of David Hockney’s shades of red – the track becomes an equally poignant and subtly-humorous celebration of the devilish hue and stolen moments alone with a mother’s open make-up box.

Armitage says: “A few years ago we were invited to choose from a range of colours selected by David Hockney and use the shade as the inspiration for a song. The song had to be no more than a minute long. We picked a lush red. I wrote from the point of view of an adolescent boy sneaking into his mother’s bedroom to experiment with her nail polish – come on, guys, we’ve all done it!

“We made the track, handed it in, and that was the last we heard of it. The song sat in a computer file for several months until Pat put it through the magic LYR mixing machine. “I’m Not Really A Waitress” is a nail lacquer colour by OPI.I thought it would make a daring title for the album but was rightly voted down.”

The issue of humanity’s essential pause for the pandemic to pass, and what has come next, provided LYR with ample inspiration in creating The Ultraviolet Age, from the populist politics decried in the pen picture of megalomaniacal leadership in Presidentially Yours to the equally heartbreaking and life-affirming, from-beyond-the-hospital-doors Covid hymn, The Song Thrush and The Mountain Ash. Forced back to normal following trauma, loss or just intense boredom, dependent on any one person’s pandemic experience, the title of the album reflects on a new era of overexposure as the world lurches from stasis to one major event after the next, a world where aggressive commerce reigns, climate change bares its teeth and digitisation consumes all.

Having explored the initial potential of LYR remotely, sharing the ideas and contributions eventually collated as Call In The Crash Team, the band’s time on the road and resultant friendships found the trio recording in a convivial, creative atmosphere, in-person at Pearson’s South Devon studio. Effectively ‘instrumentalising’ Armitage’s spoken word delivery, cutting his contributions with the Walters’ affecting, sung verses, Pearson’s production introduced both cut-and-paste modernity, as heard on opener, Paradise Lost and the glitchy Fishing Flies, while protecting the more traditional songcraft evident on tracks like the low-lit folk of Seasons Out Of Phase and the drifting piano lullaby of Heart For Sale.

Following the release of The Ultraviolet Age, LYR look ahead to performing those songs over a nine-date UK Tour later this year, taking in major city venues including those in Edinburgh, Bristol and London, plus unmissable, more intimate shows in Sunderland, Margate and Stowmarket. All of the band’s confirmed UK Tour dates are as follows:

Sat 23 Sep – Leeds, Howard Assembly Room
Sun 24 Sep – Manchester, The Deaf Institute
Tue 26 Sep – Edinburgh, The Mash House
Wed 27 Sep – Sunderland, Pop Recs
Fri 29 Sep – Margate, Where Else?
Sat, 30 Sep – Stowmarket, John Peel Centre
Sun 1 Oct – Bristol, Redgrave Theatre
Wed 4 Oct – London, Hoxton Hall
Thu 5 Oct – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre
Tickets are on sale now via links on the band’s website at www.lyrband.com

LYR revealed themselves for the first time in 2020 as they announced the release of the debut album, while the initiation of their artistic partnership occurred in 2009 when Walters approached Armitage’s publisher to explore collaborative possibilities. After the poet’s words were set to music on Walters’ 2011 solo song Redwoods, the latter approached Pearson with the prospect of creating a genre-splicing ‘supergroup’ as a three-piece. The pair sent a Dictaphone to Armitage which, after some time, was returned with widowed words looking for a permanent home and the nucleus of LYR’s Call In The Crash Team was formed over distance.

Having announced the establishment of the EMI North label in January, The Ultraviolet Age becomes the first album to emerge from EMI’s venture into a permanent operation outside London. Setting up base in Leeds, the album is released as part of EMI North’s partnership with the city’s Clue Records label.