While Daniel felt his version was good, Larios ripped into it with new tenacity. In one rehearsal, the band was playing a cover of Smog’s “Held,” which it had performed at shows several years before guitarist Gerardo Larios joined the band. When decisions for arrangements came up, he favored analog instruments like piano and organ to synths. It set out precepts for jam sessions: “Let’s keep it real let’s keep it rock ‘n’ roll,” Daniel says. The band spent months honing songs rather than taking a quick draft into the studio. To accomplish that, he knew he needed to move from LA back to Austin, where most of the band’s gear lives and where drummer Jim Eno’s Public Hi-Fi studio is located. By the end of the tour, they actually preferred some of the band-oriented versions, which brought the group closer to each other and made Daniel long for the magic of musicians working out songs in a room together. Jones of Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.”Īfter releasing Hot Thoughts in 2017, Spoon set out to tour the album and worked hard to develop live arrangements for songs filled with studio wizardry and synthetic sound. The album also nods to classic rock sounds and lyrical tropes, harkening back to The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the Mr.
But Spoon’s crunchy guitars, lean rhythms, and penchant for minor-key melodies remain. The band turns to blues-rock and R&B influences that range from gritty and driving (“The Hardest Cut”) to smooth and soulful (“The Devil & Mister Jones”). On the latest release, Spoon reinvents itself yet again, even as it revisits old haunts. No Spoon album sounds quite like another, from the minimalist rock of Kill the Moonlight, to the indie pop of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, to the electronic flourishes of Hot Thoughts. “I got bored, and I was excited about a different direction,” he says. Akin to the late-night walker in “Lucifer on the Sofa,” Daniel was restless after finishing the previous record. It’s the same neighborhood, only from a different point of view. “Now, you’re cruising up Lavaca, against the traffic lights / Gonna walk all evening there’s no one out tonight,” he sings, referencing a street not far from the corner where he stood in a lyric from 2001’s Girls Can Tell. In the new album, Daniel escapes the demonic grip of his anxiety by going on a long walk through a lonely, desolate version of Austin. That nagging darkness creeps in most often during times of stress, such as the height of the pandemic last year. “I zoned out a lot when I was forced to sit in sermons,” the singer confesses, but the reference points still seep out of his consciousness.
After his parents split when he was 8, he grew up attending Protestant churches with his mother and Catholic Mass with his father. Over the years, Spoon has often evoked apocalyptic imagery in its lyrics, perhaps due in part to Daniel’s upbringing. For Daniel, Lucifer is less a tangible being and more a symbolic concept: “It’s the worst of you, the worst of me, the thing that’s nagging you and holding you back,” he says. On its first studio album in five years, the band returns with a fresh aesthetic but the same no-frills approach to tight indie rock songs.
On “Paper Tiger,” a song from Spoon’s 2002 breakout album Kill the Moonlight, lead singer Britt Daniel avowed: “ I will no longer do the devil’s wishes.” And yet 20 years later, Satan is still crashed-out on the couch in his living room, according to the title track of Lucifer on the Sofa.