Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay are LUMP together. Started as a pure fun project, the musically hard-to-calculate psychedelic-electro-folk-pop duo increasingly develops an exciting life of its own. Their second album is called "Animal" and is unparalleled in an original way. The two don't have that much in common: Here the commercially successful and critically acclaimed folk singer Laura Marling, who in her scarce free time has also devoted herself to a master's degree in psychoanalysis for some years now. There's Mike Lindsay, studio nerd and co-mastermind of the avant-garde folktronica troupe Tunng, whose complex music, often shaped by keyboard instruments such as Moog synthesizers, is well received by a comparatively manageable audience. But sometimes the chemistry just fits: Right at the first meeting in 2016 behind the scenes of a Neil Young concert in London's O2 Arena (Marling was the opening act), the two got along so well that they decided on the spot to go into the studio together.
"We communicate through our music," Lindsay explains during their joint Zoom conversation with Marling. "We don't have to talk much most of the time." They're releasing their first album in 2018. It's also called "Lump" and is being made in secret, completely without any expectations. Yes, they even don't know themselves at first that they're working on an album. "We just let it happen." What follows are concerts together, the outbreak of a pandemic and Laura's seventh album "Song For Our Daughter", released last spring. The fact that she's also working with Mike again in parallel with the creation of the very personal and emotionally visceral solo songs - "that went totally under the radar again." The live shows, says Laura Marling, "have welded us together as a band and as a material unit in such a way that the desire to work on even more music together has made us really antsy". Again and again, one can almost say, the singer and songwriter sneaked off to Mike by the sea.
