Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys: Q&A on Pale Bloom

With Pale Bloom due February 2026 and its hypnotic first single Anchor landing September 19th, Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys continue their fearless evolution—tapping into childhood memory, myth, and sonic experimentation to create something at once intimate and expansive.

We sat down with Lucy to talk about the making of the record, the haunting imagery of Anchor, and what remains constant at the heart of The Lost Boys’ ever-shifting sound.

“Anchor” blends childhood mnemonic melodies with yearning and tension—how did revisiting those early musical memories shape the emotional core of this track?

 I don’t think I intentionally revisited them. They’re just very present, and sometimes when I open my mouth they appear. Which, I suppose, is largely what this record is about—how much your early experiences shape who you become, and how hard it is to change those melodies, or maps. They’re written on the body. A kind of signature. This song, like many on the record, doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to go backwards or forwards. There’s a deep longing for the safety of the past, as well as a desire to shake the old story and become something completely new—which is, of course, impossible.

You’ve said Pale Bloom emerged slowly, “suspending a creation myth in amber.” What did taking that extended, fragmented approach reveal about the stories you wanted to tell on this record?

Perhaps how deeply rooted and interwoven they are. They weave through all the other aspects—songs, stages, fragments. I wonder if it’s sometimes easier to discover truths when you’re not looking too directly at a subject. At some point a slow through-line started to make itself clear, and though I didn’t pull too aggressively on that thread, I let it grow between everything else until a fuller picture emerged from the pieces.

Your music often walks a line between intimacy and abrasion—how did the Lost Boys’ strings and guitar textures evolve on Pale Bloom to create the more sombre, serious character you describe?

 Liú’s guitar playing has such a nuanced, rich character and has been the quickening pulse of the band for a while now. The longer we play together, the more layered the language becomes. Somehow she manages to conjure the intensity of feeling that sits at the core of a song but can’t quite be expressed through lyric or melody. We didn’t talk much about a specific approach—except that we wanted longer instrumental passages where the audience could stay inside the landscape of the song. She just gets it. We also wanted the strings to have a more hymnal, classically sombre, almost elevating quality. JL is an extremely versatile and gifted player and was able to create something that leans into that while remaining distinct and idiosyncratic.

The visual for “Anchor”—you (un)devouring a pale white rose—feels symbolic of undoing and tender reassembly. How closely does the visual art guide or respond to the emotional landscape of your songs?

For this album the two interacted more than usual. The image of a sort of anemic gardener appeared early in the process and guided some of the songwriting, which isn’t always the case for me. For this video, I liked the idea of a singular, simple image that could draw you into the song. I’d been carrying a picture in my head of a woman pulling a rose out of her mouth—something sweet and almost lovely, but also a little disturbing. I wanted to introduce the idea of the body as earth, a kind of garden. As soon as we think about the inside of the body, we’re confronted with mortality and our animalness. This album has a lot to do with reckoning with those things.

From South Africa to Berlin and now a sixth album, your sound has shapeshifted with every release. What remains constant at the heart of Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys, even as the music keeps transforming?

That’s a lovely thing to consider. Probably a kind of restlessness, and a search—for the sound, for the subject. A tender approach to hard things.