''AMBIENT HEAT'' OUT NOW
W: Kate McDonnell I: Mitch Stöhring
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys are intensifying the anticipation for their seventh studio album, Pale Bloom (due February 13th, 2026), with the release of the hypnotic new single, ‘Ambient Heat,’ arriving on October 31st.
With its grainy yet delicate noise textures and Kruger's euphoric vocals, ‘Ambient Heat’ creates an immersive soundscape that rises and sinks like breath. Built on a rumbling baseline steady as a heartbeat, the track guides listeners through a transformative sonic experience—from the solar plexus outward to the body's edges and beyond. It reaches toward a braver, unbounded self, negotiating a new relationship with being electrically alive while grappling with questions of care and childhood innocence lost.
"The song is a bit of an existential fever dream, circling questions of care," explains Kruger. "On a very hot day in Neukölln, where I live in Berlin, the air seems to hover above the concrete. Ambient heat seeps into your bones and into your thoughts, until it feels like the world is trying to spit you out. As a child, heat like that was simply a sensation to be endured - and perhaps even enjoyed. Now it arrives as a painful question, a reminder, a reprimand - and a warning of so many other frightening things. The song comes out of that state."
Accompanying the release is a lyric video produced by South African studio GNOSSIENNE, which locates the song's radiating vital heat within the words themselves. The animation grows organically around the track's primal sonic heartbeat, with hand-animated emphasis emerging through chance distortions like ivy climbing toward light.
‘Ambient Heat’ stands as the second insight into the upcoming album. Unlike the Lost Boys’ earlier albums, which were often produced within a specific moment in time, Pale Bloom emerged slowly, attempting to suspend a creation myth in its amber—an origin tale that is ancient and complex, full of mystery and metaphor, seeking neither clarification nor end.
Each Lost Boys' release ventures into new musical and lyrical territory, and of them all, Pale Bloom reaches furthest back into childhood, unconsciously locating the rhythms and narrative styles rooted in the strictures of a religious upbringing. Sorting through the forgotten chords, refrains, and melodies from old nursery rhymes and folk songs, the band found a desire to bend these inherited sounds toward more personal truths.
This impulse is present throughout the album, audible in Kruger’s equally sonorous and euphoric voice, as she wraps the various lyrical forms around her own longing, mourning, and desire, preparing them to land within the band's lush and generous subversion of the remembered rhythms.
The album showcases a notable shift in instrumentation. Unlike their appearance on Heaving and A Human Home, the strings here are less affected, having taken on a more sombre and serious character. They stretch towards a complex kind of heaven, made possible by the weight and grounding of the grooves, which are both stoic and expressive. The guitars roam freely in between stretching, voluminous spaces, and are as grinding as they are gentle.
In support of Pale Bloom, Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys will embark on a UK tour in March 2026.
- 24.03.2026 UK Manchester The Deaf Institute
- 25.03.2026 UK Birmingham The Rainbow
- 26.03.2026 UK London The Lexington
- 27.03.2026 UK Brighton Green Door Store
- 28.03.2026 UK Bristol Ritual Union