3/25/25 ADDS
CURRENT
UPCOMING
RECENT
LIVE
ABOUT
LAMPLAND
Get Serene(Lampland)
Add date: 5.20.2025
Release date: 5.16.2025
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Facebook
Instagram
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
After nearly a decade in New York’s DIY music scene, Tommy Bazarian moved to California. His girlfriend was slated to start grad school in the fall, and so the pair packed up a minivan and drove across the country. What followed was a strange and elongated season: knowing only a few people in town, with long stretches of empty time, in the weird suburbia that is LA, Bazarian found himself brimming with an angst and restlessness he hadn’t felt since high school. Out of those months came Get Serene, the third record from his band and recording project, Lampland.
“I think the album is about wanting something exciting to happen,” Bazarian says. “It’s a teenage feeling that I’m feeling now more than I did when I was a teenager.”
The songs on Get Serene are fantasies - portraits of that adolescent yearning shot through with drama and spectacle. Fans of Mitski’s early albums will recognize the scenes of charged intimacy, the tendency to act out in search of excitement. “I’ll stare out gently into space / until you ask what’s on my mind”, he sings, sitting next to someone in a parked car, in the album’s opening lines. In “Miracles on Ice”, buzzed and alone in a bar, watching Dolly Parton sing on the corner TV, he has a runaway fantasy about joining her in the screen and “inching close until our spotlights touch”.
Album opener “Made to Blush” follows the form of another track 1, Elliott Smith’s “Sweet Adeline” - starting spare then erupting halfway through, before riding out on a guitar arpeggio that could be pulled from a Beach House song. “Holding Down Delete” is a Beck-inspired groove with doubled drum sets and arpeggiated synths. The song imagines a post-break up moment both bitter and thrilling: the singer finds himself “Making my shoulder angel gasp / cross its heart / quiet at last.”
Shortly after New Year’s 2024, Bazarian returned to New York for a month to record the album. He teamed up with Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn (Shitty Hits Recording Co.), known for producing standout albums by Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole. The sessions began with three days at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios, with Margaux Bouchegnies (known for her solo project, Margaux) on bass and vocals, and Sean Mullins (Sam Evian, Wilder Maker) playing drums. The group drew on their shared influences: the grooves and experimental colors of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the grunge-y abandon of Porches’ early records, the lofi shimmer of Chris Cohen’s home recordings.
Back at Shitty Hits Recording Co’s apartment headquarters, with the space heater blasting, they filled out the album’s arrangements. The sound was shaped by Von Schleicher’s instrument collection: vintage Italian synths, a Wurlitzer, a barely in tune piano, and Neutral Milk Hotel’s favorite organ. Von Schleicher and Mendelsohn, two of New York’s finest songwriters in their own right, have their fingerprints all over the album - performing many of the instruments, and guiding the performances of the band members. Katie and Margaux’s barely-there backing vocals brightened the arrangements, bringing the album’s intricate melodies to life.
Bazarian, a public radio producer by day, and alumni of the WNYC arts and culture show Studio 360, delivers his sharpest songwriting yet on these songs. He’s an obsessive writer - sifting through hundreds of voice memos and pages of brainstormed lyrics, before arriving at the songs’ intricate designs. The irreverence and playfulness of ‘90s indie rock shine through in the album’s lyrics. “I think your music is a place to explore your mischievous and bratty tendencies,” says Bazarian’s therapist.
The album’s title, Get Serene, is a command to yourself - to your own mind. It’s something you might speak into the mirror during a rough night. Something that slips farther away the more you reach for it. The songs on Lampland’s third LP live in the thrill of those in-between moments: suspended between boredom and possibility.
RIYL: Elliott Smith, Chris Cohen, Belle and Sebastian, Wilco, Beck, Porches, Blake Mills, Twin Peaks
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
After nearly a decade in New York’s DIY music scene, Tommy Bazarian moved to California. His girlfriend was slated to start grad school in the fall, and so the pair packed up a minivan and drove across the country. What followed was a strange and elongated season: knowing only a few people in town, with long stretches of empty time, in the weird suburbia that is LA, Bazarian found himself brimming with an angst and restlessness he hadn’t felt since high school. Out of those months came Get Serene, the third record from his band and recording project, Lampland.
“I think the album is about wanting something exciting to happen,” Bazarian says. “It’s a teenage feeling that I’m feeling now more than I did when I was a teenager.”
The songs on Get Serene are fantasies - portraits of that adolescent yearning shot through with drama and spectacle. Fans of Mitski’s early albums will recognize the scenes of charged intimacy, the tendency to act out in search of excitement. “I’ll stare out gently into space / until you ask what’s on my mind”, he sings, sitting next to someone in a parked car, in the album’s opening lines. In “Miracles on Ice”, buzzed and alone in a bar, watching Dolly Parton sing on the corner TV, he has a runaway fantasy about joining her in the screen and “inching close until our spotlights touch”.
Album opener “Made to Blush” follows the form of another track 1, Elliott Smith’s “Sweet Adeline” - starting spare then erupting halfway through, before riding out on a guitar arpeggio that could be pulled from a Beach House song. “Holding Down Delete” is a Beck-inspired groove with doubled drum sets and arpeggiated synths. The song imagines a post-break up moment both bitter and thrilling: the singer finds himself “Making my shoulder angel gasp / cross its heart / quiet at last.”
Shortly after New Year’s 2024, Bazarian returned to New York for a month to record the album. He teamed up with Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn (Shitty Hits Recording Co.), known for producing standout albums by Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole. The sessions began with three days at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios, with Margaux Bouchegnies (known for her solo project, Margaux) on bass and vocals, and Sean Mullins (Sam Evian, Wilder Maker) playing drums. The group drew on their shared influences: the grooves and experimental colors of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the grunge-y abandon of Porches’ early records, the lofi shimmer of Chris Cohen’s home recordings.
Back at Shitty Hits Recording Co’s apartment headquarters, with the space heater blasting, they filled out the album’s arrangements. The sound was shaped by Von Schleicher’s instrument collection: vintage Italian synths, a Wurlitzer, a barely in tune piano, and Neutral Milk Hotel’s favorite organ. Von Schleicher and Mendelsohn, two of New York’s finest songwriters in their own right, have their fingerprints all over the album - performing many of the instruments, and guiding the performances of the band members. Katie and Margaux’s barely-there backing vocals brightened the arrangements, bringing the album’s intricate melodies to life.
Bazarian, a public radio producer by day, and alumni of the WNYC arts and culture show Studio 360, delivers his sharpest songwriting yet on these songs. He’s an obsessive writer - sifting through hundreds of voice memos and pages of brainstormed lyrics, before arriving at the songs’ intricate designs. The irreverence and playfulness of ‘90s indie rock shine through in the album’s lyrics. “I think your music is a place to explore your mischievous and bratty tendencies,” says Bazarian’s therapist.
The album’s title, Get Serene, is a command to yourself - to your own mind. It’s something you might speak into the mirror during a rough night. Something that slips farther away the more you reach for it. The songs on Lampland’s third LP live in the thrill of those in-between moments: suspended between boredom and possibility.
RIYL: Elliott Smith, Chris Cohen, Belle and Sebastian, Wilco, Beck, Porches, Blake Mills, Twin Peaks