CONCERT: FREE ENTRY: Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys (SA)

Lucy Kruger’s music is a contemplative, near forensic journey into what shapes an interior and exterior life. Whether the now finite suite of albums with Medicine Boy (More Knives, 2014; Kinda Like Electricity, 2016; Lower, 2018; Take Me With You When You Disappear, 2020), or her solo work, (Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys, 2014, Summer’s Not That Simple, 2017, Sleeping Tapes for Some Girls, 2019, Transit Tapes (for women who move furniture around), 2021) Kruger has engaged in a slow, steady exploration of what it takes to make music that asks one to be present with feeling. She grew up in Johannesburg, where she began writing songs as a 16-year-old and laid the foundation for her live performances while studying music and drama in Grahamstown. Before moving to Berlin in 2018, Kruger recorded Sleeping Tapes for Some Girls – a set of lullabies for the restless - with hushed vocals, slow swaying instrumentation, and an undercurrent of low drones and rumbling percussion. This May the South African-born artist will release the third Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys album, ‘Transit Tapes’ (for women who move furniture around), which serves as a follow up to ‘Sleeping Tapes’ and longs to get louder. Transit Tapes (for women who move furniture around) similarly mines and documents deeply personal themes – this time Kruger’s desire to no longer have to keep things neat and contained, and a seeking of space and outward movement. “The songs begin in the bedroom, as with Sleeping Tapes, but with an eye on the window and a hand on the door. There is restlessness. A kind of building up of courage and the acknowledgment of a fear I had developed around making too much noise or causing too much of a scene.” While working on the upcoming Transit Tapes, Kruger released two singles – “Formless’ and ‘Loose Ends’ (the latter featuring fellow Berlin-based South Africans Academie) - that had also emerged in her Cape Town bedroom but that “alluded to something slightly less introverted and seemed to want to take up more space”. Abandoning efforts to make them fit into Sleeping Tapes, the songs recorded during the Sleeping Tapes sessions now function as a transition between the latter and the next stage of documentation, “one that is begging for movement”. “At some point, a song determines its own fate and these two had already moved on,” says Kruger. With a Masters's on the horizon, Kruger estimated that her creative exploration would be better served in Cape Town where she then spent several years and first met long-term

musical collaborator, André Leo. It was with Leo that she first played in Berlin during a Medicine Boy European tour in 2015 (memorable for many reasons including the many trains, buses, and trams that the duo had to take to get to venues with their instruments in tow as part of a decidedly DIY-tour). It was to propel the music forward that she eventually relocated to the city but Kruger knows that part of the move was also to explore - unfettered - a new space, both physically (mostly on her bike) and metaphysically. “In theme with the process of stepping out and trying to speak a little louder, there is a slightly bolder approach to production on this new record, inviting a fuller and darker sound,” she says of her upcoming May 2021 release. “I will move from my acoustic to electric guitar but the sound remains organic, with tracking done live with the band.” There are also more themes to explore including the centrality of women in Kruger’s lyrics, as listeners, and in her own life. “There is more pressure on a woman to figure herself out in private and then step out with a formed identity. It’s suffocating,” she says. “How are we supposed to discover who we are if we are not allowed to make a mess? To leak, spill, sweat, spit, shriek. Sometimes playing involves getting scratched or wounded. Laughing. Weeping. It also involves glorious thrill and the chance to surrender. I’m looking for that. Transit Tapes is a gentle and sometimes not so gentle reminder/push/pull to take off my winter coat and run naked like a wild thing towards the water.” In the end, says Kruger, “I do not know how to write without making it personal, and for now, I do not wish to”. She does this as a gift, both to herself, and the listener who might need it on their own journey, filled with all the risks of what it means to be human.