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La Luz

“I was in a dream, but now I can see that change is the only law.”

With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a

collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal

crisis, guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland learns to embrace a changing world with

unconditional love on News of the Universe, the new full-length from California rock band La

Luz.

News of the Universe is a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia

reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis

just two years after the birth of her son. It’s also a portrait of a band in flux, marking the first

appearance for drummer Audrey Johnson and the final ones from longtime members bassist

Lena Simon and keyboardist Alice Sandahl, whose contributions add a bittersweet edge to a

record that is both elegy for an old world and cosmic road map to a strange new one.

But is there any band in the world more suited to capturing the chaos of change in all its messy

beauty than La Luz? Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance

bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with

angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge

step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more

formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter

with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing

landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically

acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early

motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.

Yet if Cleveland has spent years writing songs about ghosts, what lurks in the shadows of News

of the Universe is nothing less than death itself. “There are moments on this album that sound

to me like the last frantic confession before an asteroid destroys the earth,” says Cleveland.

Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the

apocalypse: the breathless pitter-pattering of toms on “Strange World,” the title track’s finger-

tangling opening riff drenched in murky distortion. An atmosphere of doom hovers hazily over

the Sgt. Pepper-esque baroque pop song “Poppies,” on which Cleveland sings of a wavering

orange idyll about to be set ablaze by the late summer sun. On the similarly kaleidoscopic

“Dandelions,” she figures the yellow flowers for unsuspecting “little suns” soon to be “turning into

moons” as the season marches on. The synthesized sounds used on the band’s last record,

2021’s La Luz, to mimic the languid buzz and crackle of a summer’s day in the countryside have

been cut adrift in space—now they are silvery comet tails, dapplings of space dust, showers of

stars.

These earthy observations are inspired by Cleveland's walks around her home in the shell-

shocked days post-diagnosis when she found she had to be very intentional about what she

consumed. “Seeing the cycle of life, seeing things grow out of decay, the decay of other living

things—was super comforting to me. I had to get to a place where I felt more comfortable with

the idea of death,” she says.

But for every moment of fear, there is one of pure ecstasy. Shimmery chamber pop song “Blue

Moth Cloud Shadow” puddles into a twinkly organ-driven reverie; “I’ll Go With You” starts out

with the record’s sludgiest riff before turning into its prettiest song. “Always in Love” is a real

power-of-love ballad that serves as the record’s centerpiece and is capped off by a fiery and

jubilant guitar solo, Cleveland’s own “November Rain” moment.

The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to

the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing

all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently

and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I

hear on this record.”

Working with producer Maryam Qudos (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed

Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are

socialized to suppress. “Having that kind of connection and that comfort straightaway let us

push it further,” she says. “We didn't spend the first half of the session being careful not to

offend someone’s ego.”

Qudos also helped shape the songs, bringing ideas to the table “that to me felt like choices that

I would not normally make, but I was really stoked about,” says Cleveland, pointing out that the

dubbed-out effects on “Moon in Reverse” were all Qudos. “Sometimes she would have ideas

about the structure of the songs, which a producer often doesn't really mess with. But as a

songwriter herself, I think she felt really comfortable with us.” Their working relationship was so

organic that Qudos has since joined La Luz full-time on keyboards to replace the departing

Sandahl.

Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the

Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people

to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own

path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led

by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on

News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most

blissful. After everything, how could it not?