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Acclaimed singer-songwriter Luke Hemmings has released his highly-anticipated new EP, boy, via Arista Records. The record, co-produced with longtime collaborator Sammy Witte (Maggie Rogers, Harry Styles, Freya Ridings), is a concise and cohesive 7-track coterie of songs, each offering a new sense of maturity, growth, and humanity for Hemmings. Arriving alongside the project is a stunning official visual EP consisting of all seven tracks which premiered globally for eager fans on YouTube at midnight. Watch here. Hemmings today also released his deeply felt single “Benny” and its companion visualizer. “Benny’s” dreamy soundscape is an ode to family, but one that aches with the loss of a life sometimes lived on their periphery.
“The song is about guilt I spend a lot of time away from my family and live in a different country than them. As you get older and life moves on, things happen at home and it’s the guilt of not being there and missing moments. It’s hard to miss the good moments, but even harder to miss the bad moments. You can’t be there to fix it all and be there for the ones you love,” revealed Hemmings. Watch here.
boy’s 7 dynamic new tracks, showcase Hemmings’ lyrical and sonic evolution right from the start with the EP’s opener, “I’m Still Your Boy.” Launching with the hazy strum of an acoustic guitar and lashings of stacked vocal tracks, the production ebbs outwards, contracting for the pre-chorus before exploding out on the chorus, Hemmings, mantra like, repeating the phrase: “I’m still your boy.” Lyrically, the track anchors the EP’s larger narrative theme of the liminal space between youth and adulthood. Guided by an introspective Hemmings, still grappling to hold on to his fading boyhood, each subsequent song draws listeners further into the artists dreamlike realm where themes of youth’s departure, fear, solitude, and hope reverberate powerfully throughout the project.
When asked about the inspiration for boy, Hemmings explains, “The majority of the songs for boy were written at a time in my life when I was a stranger to stillness. The songs were born on planes and hotel room notepads, muttering under my breath while walking through new cities each day. I was disoriented and overwhelmed by the world and my place in it. Those emotions weaved themselves through this project. The longing for more emotional understanding within myself, the isolation, grief, love, sadness and hope. They’re not intended to be consumed as autobiographical facts, but as an overly dramatic, cathartic, poetic stream of my consciousness. As if you’ve opened my diary and can only read a line from each page.”
boy Track List
- I’m Still Your Boy
- Shakes
- Benny
- Close My Eyes
- Garden Life
- Close Enough to Feel You
- Promises
Today’s multiple releases not only usher in a new and exciting sonic era for Luke Hemmings and his fans around the world but they lay testament to an evolving artist, who as Dork Magazine proclaimed, “bares his introverted soul, creating a love letter to nostalgia and a quest for self-discovery.”
