The best tracks of 2023 — from The Last Dinner Party to Chappell Roan — have all seduced our eras with a deliberate dose of theatrical drama at their core. The latest to crash our hearts, minds, and playlists comes from Lucia & The Best Boys, the Scottish alt-pop project that today (August 2) amplifies its velvet decadence with “Burning Castles.” The commanding single floats out from its grand tower of ambition as the title track to Lucia’s forthcoming debut album Burning Castles, due September 29 via Communion.
“I wrote ‘Burning Castles’ about the onslaught of emotions that your body goes through when you receive bad news; that sudden and overwhelming weight that bears down on you when the news hits you,” says Lucia. “I love making something sound soft and graceful when the meaning and the experience that I’m writing about is pretty much the opposite. That sort of juxtaposition of the music and the lyrics is something that I’m prone to doing, but I think that it always manages to capture the way that I really feel in a way that makes sense to me.”
We first linked with Lucia & The Best Boys back in Fall 2020, when, via “Perfectly Untrue”, the project took a grittier approach to ’80s retro-pop while staying faithful to one of life’s most reliable sources of inspiration — heartbreak, and the layers of mental gymnastics that follow. Here, the drama seems to be magnified, and the seeds of something special have been planted. Now it’s time to bloom.
“This album has been bubbling under the surface for a long time,” Lucia adds. “It’s a build-up of everything that I’ve experienced as a woman over the past seven years… Some of which I’ve written about in the past, but now I’m older, have a completely different, clearer understanding of and want to reword or rephrase. It’s also about the confidence that I’ve found over that time.”
Pull back the curtain below.