Lucid Express have shared new single and video Hotel 65, the final release lifted from the young shoegaze group’s debut album release on July 16th via Kanine Records. Hotel 65 is a crash course in the atmospheric moods on this album; finding the band gently oscillating between crunching walls of sound, and sparkling airy passages. Lyrically, the track name checks the guesthouse where the group’s singer Kim Ho stayed when visiting the UK and speaks of a relationship that should never have happened between two strangers who know that their time together is only going to be brief. Alongside their last single release, Hollowers, it’s another song that contributes to the sense of uncertainty and impermanence that permeates the Lucid Express album. A sense established from the opening track North Acton, which acknowledges that “none of this would last forever” to the melancholy wish of the album closer Ride The Night, which dreams of being able to stretch an evening into eternity.
The Hotel 65 video is crafted as a collage of footage taken from the band’s travels in their native Hong Kong, as well as in Vietnam, Japan, the UK and the United States. These flashes of scenery reflect the lyrical turns of the song, while being interspersed with the words themselves scrawled onto mirrors, notebooks and paper scraps. Watch the video clip via YouTube below.
Hotel 65 follows the release of Hollowers (featuring Adam Honingford of The Bilinda Butchers) and the band’s gently defiant Wellwave single with its hazy music video shot on Tai Mo Shan, the tallest mountain in Hong Kong.
Lucid Express are a group of five young dreamers creating an airy blend of shoegaze and indie pop amongst the skyscrapers, mountains, and packed alleyways of Hong Kong. The name itself a modest mission statement of the band’s intent. Lucid in the poetic sense of something bright and radiant. The Lucid Express operating as the service to take the listener on a journey through the band’s colour-soaked sounds.
The sweetness of Lucid Express’ sound is rendered even more striking when considering the social-political climate in Hong Kong. The group formed as teens in the winter of 2014, in the turbulent weeks just prior to the Umbrella Movement; the latest in a series of tense pro-democracy protests against increasingly brutal state suppression in their home region. Kim Ho, explains that “at that time it felt like we have a need to hold on to something more beautiful than before. Like close friendships, the band, our creation.”
Amidst the scenes of tear-gassed and beaten protesters, politically-targeted arrests, and death threats from government officials, Kim was meeting with like-minded musicians Andy, Samuel, Sky, and Wai in the small practice space they rent in the remote industrial Kwai Hing neighborhood. A place to create something that they could call their own. Something that lived outside of the world they were experiencing.
Lucid Express’ self-titled debut is due for release digitally and on vinyl on July 16 via the US label Kanine Records. The tracks are given an extra sparkle thanks to the creative mixing of Max Bloom from those noisy UK indie-heads Yuck.
‘Lucid Express’ track list
North Acton
Hotel 65
Ado
Sore
Hollowers
No Talk
Aquarium
Wellwave
Prime Of Pride
Ride The Night
‘Lucid Express’ will be available everywhere in limited edition turquoise vinyl, as well as being offered in a coke bottle clear finish exclusively at Rough Trade shops.
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