Los Angeles, CA · indie folk · folk rock

Lord Huron

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Cinematic Los Angeles folk rock built on Ben Schneider's reverb-soaked storytelling and a running mythology of doomed romance.

Ben Schneider grew up in Okemos, Michigan, studied visual arts at the University of Michigan and in France, and worked as an artist in New York City before relocating to Los Angeles. There, in 2010, he began recording alone under the name Lord Huron, taken from Lake Huron, where he had spent childhood summers.

The lineup filled out with old friends once the songs needed a full band: Mark Barry, Miguel Briseño and Tom Renaud have played with him for most of Lord Huron's run. Reviewers have linked the group's sound, country, folk rock and surf-rock layered with soundtrack and new-age textures, to the high-lonesome tradition of the Band, Neil Young and Fleet Foxes.

The records arrive with fictional apparatus attached: invented authors, pulp-novel cover art, back stories for narrators who turn up across more than one song. For 2012's Lonesome Dreams, the band built a series of western-style videos framed as pulp adventure tales, an idea Schneider traced partly to a collection of Billy the Kid poetry, before following it with Strange Trails, Vide Noir, Long Lost and The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1.

'The Night We Met,' from 2015's Strange Trails, was a slow-burning album track until it appeared in the series 13 Reasons Why, after which it became the band's most-streamed song by a wide margin. It was certified gold in 2017 and platinum in 2018, and a 2018 remix added vocals from Phoebe Bridgers for the show's second season.

Live, the guitars keep the tremolo and slapback of the recordings, and Schneider tends to sing the older material close to how it was cut.

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indie folkfolk rock