LYR

- LYR unite poet, Simon Armitage’s lyrics with fellow band members, Richard Walters and Patrick J Pearson’s spellbinding, ‘transcendent’ sonics on new, era-soundtracking album The Ultraviolet Age 

- Nine new UK live dates return the band to the stage following critically-acclaimed tour and festival dates in support of their 2020 debut album, Call In The Crash Team 

Bitten by the bug of nights in tour bus bunks, equally inspired and dismayed by times of tumult and determinedly chasing the simple, soul-enriching beauty found in intricately-constructed song, LYR return with their second, remarkable album, The Ultraviolet Age on Fri 30 June 2023 via Clue Records/EMI North. For a second, compelling time, the band concocts ethereal, pulse-altering, extraordinary sounds by combining the creative powers of British poet, Simon Armitage, singer-songwriter Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson.
 
LYR also announce a nine-date UK Tour for September and October, setting off from Leeds, Howard Assembly Room on Sat 23 Sep 2023 and moving on to include dates in Manchester, Edinburgh and London.
 
In an age of incessant noise and constant crisis in a post-pandemic period of nought-to-sixty-in-no-time overexposure, LYR’s studied, sweeping, sonically affluent document of this, The Ultraviolet Age, sets hares running into an unknown future and provides commas, if not full stops, of emotive reflection on recent, collective trauma.
 
Announcing their follow up to the lockdown-release of their 2020 debut, Call In The Crash Team with the beats-meets-flowing-melodies majesty of Presidentially Yours, global issues of dictatorship and post-truth politics finds the trio convincingly standing up their assertion that they have become every inch the ‘proper band’. Through five minutes of weaving, wide-lens composition, Armitage effectively reshapes the norms of the punk front man and the protest singer with measured menace to meet, then deftly steer focus towards, Walters’ stop-everything chorus.

Each potent ingredient of the band’s first piece of new music in three years is enveloped in the snaking strings, piano-lines and dramatic basslines indebted to Pearson’s meticulous studio craft, the musician and producer’s effective innovations extending to switching alluringly from mono to stereo between verse and chorus.
 
Uniting for sessions at Pearson’s remote studio in South Devon, in addition to building tracks during busy periods of their own individual calendars in file-exchanges and remote recording, LYR’s cohesion as a music-making unit has elicited notable advances. Although made clear to the listener within their work, Armitage points out that the band’s guiding aim remains: “Making beautiful, exquisite, transcendent music.”
 
He continues to say of Presidentially Yours: “It was written as a response to the growing number of political dictatorships across the globe on both extremes of the political spectrum. It’s presented as a dramatic monologue spoken by a tyrant.  In that world, violence and repression are never far from the surface, no matter how glossy and gold-plated that surface seems to be. The title of the song is pure arrogance: the person in charge doesn’t care what anyone thinks because they control all aspects of life including language and “truth” - they are untouchable.”

Walters adds: “Lyrically, I wanted to be the angel on the shoulder to Simon's devil...the insecure, imposter-syndrome voice in the tyrant's head saying 'you deserve me...please don't desert me.' I was thinking of the absurdity of it all, the confusion of just being surrounded by yes-men and boot lickers, the endless loopholes of power and the con of control.”
 
>From behind the mixing desk, keyboard and computer screen, Pearson says: “It started as an ominous synth sample, a sound I’d put aside knowing it would find its place. It was labelled ’SYNTH MEAN’ so perhaps that says all you need to know.”
 
Purpose-created album artwork centred on figures crafted by Armitage in the studio of British sculptor, Anthony Gormley, adds to the encompassing sense of collaboration and no-limits artistic enquiry.
 
He recalls of the effigies’ creation: “"I made the effigies at Antony Gormley's Norfolk studio - we laughed at them at the time, crude looking clay biscuit-men on the table next to his amazing creations - but they'd acquired a strange primitive innocence when they came out of the kiln."
 
Initially resistant to any kind of live appearances at the band’s experimental inception, LYR’s stage debut at Leeds’ legendary Brudenell Social Club just two-weeks prior to the first national lockdown in March 2020 gave the three friends and collaborators thirst for more, just as the opportunity was lost for an indeterminable period. Citing their shared on-stage experiences as fundamental to the creation of The Ultraviolet Age, LYR strike out to perform on a run of dates in support of the album later this year.
 
With tickets for all dates going on general sale on Fri 5 May 2023 and album pre-order and advance fan on sale information available on the band’s website at www.lyrband.com, all currently confirmed LYR UK Tour dates are as follows:

• Sat 23 Sep – Leeds, Howard Assembly Room
• Sun 24 Sep – Manchester, The Deaf Institute
• Tue 26 Sep – Edinburgh, The Mash House
• Wed 27 Sep – Sunderland, Pop Recs
• Fri 29 Sep – Margate, Where Else?
• Sat, 30 Sep – Stowmarket, John Peel Centre
• Sun 1 Oct – Bristol, Redgrave Theatre
• Wed 4 Oct – London, Hoxton Hall
• Thu 5 Oct – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre

LYR’s story stretches back to 2009 when Walters, an admirer of Armitage’s extensive body of written work, approached the poet’s publisher about the possibility of collaboration. The result was Walters setting Armitage’s poetry to music in his 2011 solo song Redwoods. Realising that their two-part formula had potential to grow, Walters approached musical acquaintance, Pearson, and his joining provided the impetus to create the genre-splicing ‘supergroup’.
 
Creating LYR Mk.1, Walters and Pearson provided Armitage with a Dictaphone and waited for over two years for the poet to return the machine with spoken verses, fragments of work that had never found any other place to call home. When set to music, Call In The Crash Team came into existence.
 
Whilst artistically successful, opening the door to greater possibility, the three-piece point to The Ultraviolet Age as the advanced stage of that possibility. Coming together with focused, blended labour to instrumentalise Armitage’s words and vocal delivery, opposing the tag of ‘spoken word project’ or similar, the band ruminates instead on what aural breakthroughs could only be possible with a non-singing vocalist, gifted singer-songwriter and alchemistic musician-producer.
 
Having announced the establishment of the EMI North label in January, The Ultraviolet Age becomes the first release to emerge from EMI’s venture into a permanent operation outside London. Setting up base in Leeds, the album is released as part of EMI North’s partnership with the city’s Clue Records label.