Luluc

Luluc’s sixth album, Sweet Thief, was pertinently and primarily shaped by two key decisions from Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett. The first was to spend Christmas 2024 at the family home of their friend J Mascis, the second was to return to Australia soon after, on inauguration day, January 2025, and spend the following year far away from the country that they’ve come to call home over the past decade or so.

The first of those decisions would lead to the Dinosaur Jr frontman’s appearance on Sweet Thief, Mascis adding his playful, signature percussion to a few of the songs here. Recorded in his attic-studio on Christmas Day, J’s drumming is folded into the folk-like textures of Luluc’s signature sound, the beautiful vocal harmonies that characterise their kinship, to give the album a spirited backbone for Zoë and Steve to play to, and build from.

That second choice, to spend a full year out on the Australian coast, would give them the time, space, and opportunity to breathe fresh life into their work, to shape and re-shape the album into twenty-six minutes of beautiful new music where not a single note is wasted, that feels like a distinctive new chapter in their story that continues to blossom in bold new colours. With a couple of decade’s worth of experience now behind them, a winding success story through major labels, notable collaborations as well as a deliberate move away from such things, that sense of space and detachment felt not only required but also supremely cherished. 

Formed of ten new songs, Sweet Thief was sketched out in Brooklyn in the summer of 2024, in the studio the duo have spent the past decade or so building and making their own. It follows 2023’s ‘Diamonds’, their fifth album, and one which in many ways paved the way for this new chapter of Luluc. “The opening track on ‘Diamonds’ is a song about renewal, a renewal that happened during that period,” Steve explains. “In many ways it's a prelude to ‘Sweet Thief’. It's where we were able to shed a lot of things…I think this is really the first record we've made where it's about us and us only, where there are no competing voices.”

On their own terms, Luluc’s way of working remains unchanged, and it continues to form a key part of both the relationship between Zoë, Steve and their band’s signature sound. That formula is one of both meditation and exploration. While the songs are layered and sculpted over long periods of time, where the pair’s dynamism and unspoken musical connection comes to the fore, their roots are in isolation, in the quiet spaces Zoë retreats to when writing. “That space is quiet and quite isolated,” she explains, “but it’s where I feel deeply connected to the people I love, and also to a much broader sense of shared experience that we've all got. To me, that's the most important thing about the work.” 

Presented and written with sensitivity, there’s also a wryness that runs through these songs, a playful, occasionally buoyant edge that can twist the meaning of words and sentiments from light to dark and back again. The album takes its title from a line in a Shakespeare sonnet, presenting it as a metaphor for the world as we find it today; an ever-changing kaleidoscope of love and hate, beauty and bloodshed, underpinned by a constant grapple for our attention.

While it’s musically creative and melodic, there’s a palpable tension that sits at the heart of Sweet Thief, Luluc constantly questioning and examining the shiny surface of modernity alongside the exploitation and existential manipulation that has crept into almost every aspect of our lives. The album isn’t simply about holding a mirror up to that world, however, instead Luluc prise such notions apart, look for the beating heart at the core of such ideas however obscured it might be.

Take a song like ‘Rewarding Melody’. Approached at face value, it could be a simple love song, an ode to holding on to what’s come before; “I’ll make for you a rewarding melody / One you can come to anytime you need”, Zoë sings. But there’s something in the delivery of it, a dryness, an almost unseen wink of an eye, that shifts that perspective the closer you look at it. Led by Mascis’ jaunty percussion, wrapped up inside Zoë and Steve’s warm production, it feels indicative of the album’s strange and alluring gaze. 

Elsewhere, ‘No One Else’s Pen’ is indeed a love song, a restrained three-minutes of hushed acoustics, gentle fluctuations that sing to our desire to navigate relationships with honesty and honour, a gratefulness for what we have in a world that continues to take and take. “There's no cliché I wanna live by,” Zoë sings, echoing a mantra that runs right through the heart of the band’s work. 

The duo avoid such cliches by always looking out for one another. Zoë’s writing is never afraid to peer over the edge and look into the abyss, to examine the darker parts of life, the absurdity that we’re even here at all,  but such contemplation is always counterbalanced by Steve’s ability to play off that confliction while nudging things back toward the light. Such light is in the undergrowth throughout Sweet Thief, and the escapism of nature is always present; in birdsong, in rivers, upon mountains; in the light that lingers and how we all choose to spend our short time within it. 

“We're constantly told that we have to be part of specific groups, that we're part of movements, but life is actually an individual experience,” Zoë says of the album’s overarching theme. “What you do with your life is in your hands and no one else's. Doing harm to others, trying to get one over on other people, is all based on delusions and false promises. Far more important is the individual relationship you have with your life.” 

Sweet Thief draws to a close with ‘Homesick in L.A’, the only song on the album to pass the four-minute mark and one where the atmosphere Luluc creates is lifted to new heights, elevating the song’s gripping sense of melodrama. Unrolling like a short-film of its own, simmering with a Leonard Cohen like patience, it’s a striking moment of reflection, indicative of the recurring questions that run throughout Sweet Thief: namely, how do we continue to move forward when every step leaves someone else behind?

They might not always have the answer, but the asking itself feels important. As the world continues to lose its grip on how to find meaning and connection, as our shared experiences are pulled apart and exploited for profit and gain, the songs on ‘Sweet Thief’ remind us that maybe it’s enough to just look to light, to sit in quiet isolation and make a rewarding melody.