Album Review: The Lumineers, Automatic

“You’re all I got,” Wesley Schultz plaintively pleads on the Paul McCartney-style ‘Keys On The Table’, sounding somewhat different to the Schultz of previous Lumineers albums. Rather intriguingly, he entreats the same line on ‘You’re All I Got’, another of the heart-wrenching ballads that stud Automatic.

It’s not exactly Lumineers 2.0, but there is a striking and novel vulnerability crisscrossing the record, which at times is cunningly offset by a searing wit. On the succinctly titled ‘Asshole’, Schultz trills, “The first we ever met / You thought I was an asshole / Probably correct”.

Since their self-titled debut in 2012, The Lumineers have chewed some ground – five studio albums, billions of streams, packed global arena tours and Grammy nominations. But this new songwriting phase found them treading different terrain, and so, they reached out to Woodstock-based producer David Baron, whom the band have worked with in various capacities since 2016’s Cleopatra.

Baron always reckoned that something besides the band’s great songs were the reason fans flocked to their shows. Inspired by Peter Jackson’s 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, he kitted out Woodstock’s Utopia studio like the legendary Abbey Road and they went to work, cutting tracks live.

The strategy more than worked – the title of album opener ‘Same Old Song’ is a malapropism that shoots out the gate, while ‘Automatic’ and ‘Better Day’ forgo The Lumineers’ multi-tracked vocals of yore. Rather, Schultz’s voice is now unadorned, stark and absolutely mighty.

8/10

Out now