Son Lux

Since starting Son Lux as a solo project, founder Ryan Lott has garnered a reputation as “the kind of songwriter who can turn the most intimate moments sweeping and majestic” (Pitchfork). But after crafting his first three albums alone, Lott stumbled upon a kinship with two musicians a decade his junior that was too strong to ignore: Ian Chang, whose rhythmic constructions “don’t feel so much like beats as sculptures” (NPR), and Rafiq Bhatia, who treats musical ingredients “as architectural elements — sound becomes contour; music becomes something to step into rather than merely follow” (New York Times). After collaboratively creating, releasing, and touring 2015’s Bones and 2018’s Brighter Wounds, Son Lux has solidified into a band, with each member bringing their unique sonic approach to create an otherworldly whole.

Son Lux’s sound is distinctly individual, a result of their reverence for artists who have carved an iconoclastic path forward. The band’s fluid approach to genre and structure draws on the groundwork of soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation, owing a debt to forebears as wide-ranging as Björk, Alice Coltrane, D’Angelo, Bob Dylan, and J Dilla. While their balancing of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions has earned comparisons to contemporaries like James Blake and Flying Lotus, Son Lux feels that it is the act of distilling their varied influences that has most strongly shaped their identity. They conjure vivid, unexpected worlds of sound, evoking textures as different as those of Timbaland and Terry Riley within the same composition.