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Apr 24, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Silken Weinberg

Storefront Church (the Los Angeles-based project of Lukas Frank) has announced a new album, Ink & Oil, and shared a new song from it, “Coal,” as well as a live video for the song. Ink & Oil is due out June 28. Check out both the studio and live versions of “Coal” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

Ink & Oil includes the lush, string-backed “The High Room,” which was shared in March and was one of our Songs of the Week.

The album was inspired by Frank’s great uncle, Roger, who was serving a five-year sentence for a desertion charge of the Army in 1993 when he disappeared from his cell and was never found, leaving only an orange behind. From there, things get decidely more ghostly, as a press release explains in more detail:

“When he was just 5 years old, Lukas began receiving visitations from his elusive uncle through vivid, recurring nightmares. Roger would come to Lukas in his room and try to speak with him, but Roger’s mouth wasn’t working; like it was glued shut. In his hands was a large orange, the skin peeled back, and written in the rind were words in black ink.

“The subsequent years of his life spent between LA, with family on the East Coast and a solitary sabbatical in Connecticut, have been inexplicably haunted by sensory ‘manifestations’ seemingly tied to his uncle’s presence. Images of a black rope hanging in the sky, a flock of black birds swarming inside the supermarket, and phone calls from unknown numbers asking him unnervingly prescient questions have all struck Lukas at various points. Stuck in limbo between walking nightmares and existential visions, Lukas’ perspective shifted with his return to Los Angeles while working on this body of work. Instead of feeling like the visions and dreams were intruders in the night, they became visitors—not always welcome or understood—but accepted as integral pieces of the narrative of Ink & Oil.”

Storefront Church’s debut album, As We Pass, came out in 2021 via Sargent House. That album’s lead single, “After the Alphabets,” which featured Cole Smith of DIIV, was one of our Songs of the Week. Previously, Storefront Church’s “The Gift” was featured on the soundtrack to Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. More recently, Frank collaborated with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier on the track “La Langue Bleue,” which was featured in an episode of the AMC series Monsieur Spade.

Ink & Oil Tracklist:

1. The High Room
2. Faith In Oil
3. Melting Mirror
4. King of the Lobby
5. Burn The Roses
6. Words in the Rind
7. Coal
8. Manhattan Project
9. Orange Grove
10. Divine Distraction
11. Shadowboxing
12. Tapping on the Glass

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