Lucky Soul are back with stunning new single ‘No Ti Amo’ – the first from their forthcoming third record, ‘Hard Lines’, released August 11^th on Crystal Paris Records.

Celebrate the launch of the album with Lucky Soul's first London show in 7 years with and expanded line up, DJs and exclusive playback of tracks from the album, plus support from Cardiff-based electropop sensation ANi GLASS.

It’s been seven long years since Lucky Soul’s critically acclaimed second album, ‘A Coming Of Age’, and a time – personally, musically, culturally – of often-extreme change.

‘No Ti Amo’ is an unexpected but effortlessly assured return for Lucky Soul: unfurling slowly over seven, sun-kissed minutes, it’s as much a love-letter to ‘Tango In The Night’, Nile Rogers or Italo disco 12”s as it is rooted in the less-exotic realities of modern South London life (in which the record was meticulously self-produced). From its pizzicato strings to looped synth riff, ‘No Ti Amo’ is a perfect (re)introduction to a band who seem intent on trying something new, and also something wholly for themselves: the results feel escapist, romantic, and creatively rejuvenated.

Whilst the surfaces may shimmer, at its heart ‘Hard Lines’ is a record of frustration, anger, and – through it all – hope. Soaring torch-song ‘(Hurts Like A) Bee Sting’, completed to the backdrop of Brexit in 2016; the tougher, afrobeat-funk of ‘Livin’ On a Question Mark’, meanwhile, began life as the riot police marched through Camberwell in 2011, and discusses a timeless sense of disillusionment. Yet here are songs, too, of staying together, and pulling the people that matter close to you (see the sultry, progressively-stormy soundscapes of ‘One Touch’, or the bittersweet pop rush of ‘Too Much’).

Its slow-build conception may have led many to assume that Lucky Soul had gone their separate ways, but the steely determination, hard-won patience and self-described “obsession” of Laidlaw’s to get the band together again enriches the textured but instantly-infectious feel to ‘Hard Lines’. “Seeing the conkers fall every year,” he says now, “I said to myself: this needs to finish. In the end it took me to some really dark places of creative psychosis and I had to be threatened to finish it! But the last line on the record is “keep it together”, so there is hope too and a belief that love can save us. I guess becoming a parent also makes you think harder about the future.” Quite what that future holds for any of us may still be uncertain, but ‘Hard Lines’ suggests that it’s one with Lucky Soul back in it, right where they belong.

For more information please contact press@crystalparis.co.uk

Image: Kathy Anne Lim