• News

• All

Jun 26, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Emily Cross

Loma are releasing a new album, How Will I Live Without a Body, this Friday via Sub Pop. Now they have shared its third single, “Affinity,” via a music video. Watch it below.

Loma consists of Shearwater singer Jonathan Meiburg, alongside Emily Cross (of Cross Record) and Dan Duszynski.

Allison Beondé directed the “Affinity” video and had this to say about it in a press release: “In creating the video for ‘Affinity,’ I wanted to collect quiet moments that explore the experience of inhabiting a body, existing both collectively and simultaneously alone. Capturing people in public spaces embodying their own experience, their own world, while surrounded by others, the song is carried on a rolling rhythm reminiscent of waves—a soft and mysterious ebbing and flowing of time marked by something so elemental to our existence and uniquely capable of eliciting reflection on what it means to be alive.”

How Will I Live Without a Body follows 2020’s Don’t Shy Away. Previously Loma shared the album’s first single, “How It Starts,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared its second single, “Pink Sky,” via an animated video. “Pink Sky” was also one of our Songs of the Week.

The pandemic found the band living on different continents, with Duszynski in central Texas, Cross in Dorset, England (she’s a UK citizen), and Meiburg in Germany to research a book. Remote sessions didn’t work and an attempt to reconvene in Texas after the pandemic didn’t garner much fruit when it was cut short due to illness.

“We got lost,” says Meiburg in a press release, “and stayed that way.”

“It’s like a demon enters the room whenever we get together,” laments Cross.

Then, at Cross’ suggestion, they gathered in a tiny stone house in England, a house that used to a coffin-maker’s workshop and where Cross works as an end-of-life doula. They turned it into a makeshift studio, with a vocal booth made from a coffin woven from willow branches.

“There was a sense of, well, this is it,” Meiburg says of the stone house sessions. “And when the ice storm swept in I thought: here we go again, even the elements are against us. But sitting in our heavy coats around a little electric radiator, we realized how much we’d missed each other—and that just being together was precious.”

Legendary artist Laurie Anderson offered Loma an opportunity to work with an AI trained on her full body of work. The AI sent the band two poems in the style of Anderson, in response to a photo Meiburg sent from his book-in-progress about Antarctica. “We used parts of them in a few songs,” he says. “And then Dan noticed that one of its lines, ‘How will I live without a body?’ would be a perfect name for the album, since we nearly lost sight of each other in the recording process.”

Anderson gave her blessing for the band to use the title for their new album. “I think she was tickled that her AI doppelganger is running around naming other people’s records,” says Meiburg.

At the end of the day, the band’s resilience paid off.

“Making this record tested us all,” says Duszynski. “I think that feeling was alchemized through the music.”

“Somehow, out of the chaos, we made something that sounds very relaxed,” Cross says.

“I’ve never run a marathon,” she adds. “But I can imagine it’s kind of what that feels like.”

Read our 2018 interview with Loma.

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.