The Hong Kong-based dream-pop band Lucid Express has released a new track entitled “Hollowers” off their upcoming self-titled debut LP due out July 16th via Kanine Records. The five-piece formed as teenagers in 2014 during the weeks preceding Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, pro-democracy protests against China’s increasingly totalitarian attempts to control the region. The band’s vocalist Kim Ho recounts, “At that time, it felt like we had a need to hold on to something more beautiful than before. Like close friendships, the band, our creation.”
While it has been several years since those tense protests and the band’s early beginnings, conditions between Hong Kong and China have only grown worse. It seems pretty fitting that amidst these new tensions, the band is readying their debut release. “Hollowers” features Adam Honingford from the San Francisco-based group The Bilinda Butchers. Lucid Express first met the musician while he was on tour with his band in Hong Kong, and they remained friends since. Kim explains, “From the first time we heard Adam on stage in Hong Kong, we always wanted to ask him to sing on one of our songs.”
“Hollowers” finds the band exploring the more light-filled areas of dream-pop, but those blissful expanses are balanced by shoegaze’s shadowy regions of blaring sound. From its initially airy beginnings with arpeggiating synth-lines awash in glowing, strummed melody, the track explodes into electric walls of expanding guitar. Meanwhile, singers Kim Ho and Adam Honingford help balance the energies as dreamy higher register vocals meet warm baritone.
