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Sep 07, 2023 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Jono Foley

Tomorrow, Austin-based singer/songwriter Walker Lukens is set to debut his new solo album, Accessible Beauty, offering up a set of silken, synth-laden meditations on love and romance. The record is his fourth studio album, his first since his 2019 album, ADULT, though he’s also kept busy during the pandemic years with a record of Willie Nelson covers and an ambient album.

After those pandemic-era experiments, Accessible Beauty sees him going back to retro-inflected indie pop, steeping his songwriting in both a sense of starry romanticism and a withering eye toward the travails of love and desire. As he describes, the record was inspired by a fascination with “people who can’t take care of themselves, but are deeply committed to their romantic lives.”

Lukens has already shared a string of new singles from the record, but today he’s back with an early listen to one of the album’s highlights, “Man & Wife,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Man & Wife” pulls from the joy and anxiety of marriage, with Luken’s lyrics meditating on a wedding day inner monologue, weaving together joyous devotion with hints of nervous anticipation: “You be the sun, and I’ll be your man / Borrow a prayer, do whatever I can / Howl at the moon honey, call your friends / Run get the camera, baby it’s me and you.” Meanwhile, the track also finds Lukens leaning into laid-back guitar grooves and earworm instrumental hooks, pairing the track’s emotive element with an insistently catchy and eminently danceable pop undercurrent.

Lukens explains of the track, “The morning after the wedding of two friends, Andy and Anna, I woke up with the lyric “Never have to be old, but we’re getting older everyday” in my head. It took me two years to come up with the follow up lyric, “never have to swallow dust, even as we’re settling.” It took Alexander [Wild Child] about 30 minutes to write out a draft of the rest. We wanted to write a campy, Bowie-esque song about weddings, but ended up with a sort of tone poem about the hopes and anxieties that cis men have about throwing a wedding / getting married. The week before the session, I got an electric Suzuki Taishogoto off of Ebay. It’s playing the lead line in the instrumental break.”

Check out the song below. Accessible Beauty is out everywhere tomorrow, September 8th via Luck Hound Music.