Upcoming Releases

L.S. Dunes has announced their highly anticipated sophomore album Violet, which is set to be released on January 31st via Fantasy Records. 

On the new album Travis Stever shares, “‘Violet’ is a sonic journey into the depths of every band member of L.S. Dunes. The collaborative efforts to bring each song to a full potential came naturally. It’s the album that has always lived in us individually but could only be made together. It has melodies that have lived within me since I was a child. It was only with this band I would be able to find a place where they could find a home in song.”

The earliest version of L.S. Dunes—the one that introduced themselves to the world at Chicago’s Riot Fest in 2022 and went on to release their blissfully chaotic debut, Past Lives, later that year—was birthed in turbulence. There was a pandemic. There were time and family constraints. There were members away on tour with one of their many other bands: Anthony Green’s Saosin and Circa Survive, Frank Iero’s My Chemical Romance, Tim Payne and Tucker Rule’s Thursday, and Travis Stever’s Coheed and Cambria, among them. Somehow, they managed to make it work, releasing a few more singles along the way, and touring the globe for a growing and passionate cult-like fanbase. By and large, it was a successful first effort. But there were also some unforeseen consequences, and as the album cycle came to an end, there was at least one mistake that Green knew they needed to correct.

“I became so sick of playing the song where I sing, ‘Sorry that I wish that I was dead,’ and I am so sorry I even wrote that song,” he says of “Sleep Cult,” the closing track on their debut. “I’m grateful that people resonate with it, but it just wasn’t helpful for me to sing that every night or to talk about that. So this time, I personally decided that I really wanted to make a record that says there is magic in the world. I wanted to celebrate music and the transformative power that it has to connect and inspire people. I wanted to make something that was in complete opposition to that song—something that says, I want to live.” 

By any measure, Violet—once again helmed by Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip—lives up to that promise, and in many ways, it opens up an opportunity to rediscover L.S. Dunes in a different light. Where Past Lives takes its oxygen from the thrill of frenzy and impulsiveness, Violet breathes deeper with a more open and expansive palette. Whether it lives in the confident and steady pulse of a song like “Machines,” in the rousing lyrical empowerment of “Paper Tigers,” or in the way that “Forgiveness” forges itself as an anthem for love and unconditional acceptance in the face of our personal failures, this is a body of work that secures multiple outcomes: There is hindsight. There is hope. There is, in fact, magic.

Perhaps no greater evidence of this exists but in the album’s name. Violet. A word that entered Iero’s subconscious while mumbling scratch lyrics to a new song he was writing, a word that became the working title for that song, and a word that survived demo after demo until it finally became the name of the album—despite not appearing anywhere in the final lyrics of the title track. “It just happened,” Iero insists.

Violet track listing:

1. Like Magick
2. Fatal Deluxe
3. I Can See It Now…
4. Violet
5. Machines
6. You Deserve To Be Haunted
7. Holograms
8. Paper Tigers
9. Things I Thought Would Last Forever
10. Forgiveness