Taken from the album “Nostalgia Killer”, available June 9, 2023 on Western Vinyl.
In 2019, Lightning Dust broke up. Not the band, but Amber Webber and Joshua Wells–the couple at the core of it–ended their longtime relationship. In the wake of the split, the two musicians realized that Lightning Dust was still important to them and decided to stay together as an artistic partnership. The experience made them think about nostalgia as a concept and how this sort of longing for the past can be destructive, cancerous, useless. Webber and Wells reconvened virtually in mid-2020 to work together again as creative comrades, sharing some new ideas by correspondence, stitching together their song fragments into the dramatic arrangements now heard across Lightning Dust’s forthcoming new album, Nostalgia Killer.
Nostalgia Killer. The title couldn’t set a more perfect expectation for what the album holds. Hearing those words together, one might anticipate something harder, more chilly and severe. But what happens is quite the opposite: listeners find themselves wandering into someplace warm, guided by familiar sounds and voices. Little do they know they’ll soon be flung into a climate unknown. Throw away the old coat–these songs signal a new season.
Lightning Dust have created a world unto itself with Nostalgia Killer, one with depth and space, with its own light and air, a humidity you can move through–thick with emotion, sticky with unresolved, living feelings. There’s a sense of refusing to let the past engulf us, and yet there is still so much love for those layers of experience. This is a winding and moving album. Sensual, confessional, and free of fences. Each song builds with inexorable force, often pulling back to a whisper before washing over the listener completely. With their wealth of new imagery and the most incandescent flights, Lightning Dust sweeps you away from wherever you happen to be.
music won't save you 