Featured Photo Credit: Lauren Dunn
Lauv is no “Stranger” to transparency on his sophomore album, All 4 Nothing.
The highly anticipated project from the multi-platinum artist is a mix of ballads and bops that showcase Lauv’s authenticity and vulnerability; staples of his music.
In a press conference hosted by 1824, Lauv shared the emotional roots of the album describing it as, “me on the journey to find my own inner light again.”
That journey for Lauv has been a fluid process. “I’ll put on instrumentals and freestyle in the car and sometimes ideas will come out of nowhere and it makes me trust myself a lot more,” he explained. “Before I was scared to just be in the moment because I was like what if I say something stupid or what if I do something that’s not cool, then I realized I’m going to have so many bad ideas and so many good ideas too and I just got to get through it all.”
Filtering through the good and bad has allowed Lauv to expose some of his deepest and most vulnerable lyrics yet. In songs like “Molly in Mexico” and his personal favorite, “Bad Trip,” Lauv bares “the side that’s a little bit less polished and pretty. I tried to just literally recount whatever was going on in my life,” he shared.
At the time that Lauv was writing the album, he had just released How I Was Feeling, a project that grew out of loneliness and his struggles with mental health. “I was so unhappy on the inside and felt so anxious on the inside that my next journey was, okay, let me define what happiness is for myself and let me go and find that,” Lauv shared.
That journey is chronicled in singles like “26,” “All 4 Nothing (I’m So In Love), and “Kids Are Born Stars” where Lauv is open and honest about his inner healing through poignant lyrics.
We also see his honesty in the visuals for the album. In the video for “Strangers,” directed by Hannah Lux Davis, we see Lauv get lost in a raging sea of emotions and a fear of losing it all.
This album shares both the rawness of Lauv’s previous projects and highlights an evolved side of Lauv.
“I used to be a control freak and needed to be at the computer producing everything as I’m working on the song,” he explained. On this new album, “I actually took more of a zoomed out approach where I was just focused mostly on the songwriting and the singing and writing the songs on the microphone. I had a few different friends of mine that I really trust that as producers kind of brought in some new sounds and some new vibes.”
The result of this new collaborative approach is what Lauv affectionately refers to as “50% healing, 50% party,” something that will resonate with both longtime and new fans.
Lauv hopes to find more ways to connect with fans in the future, including his All 4 Nothing tour beginning August 11. When asked about how excited he is to perform his latest two albums live, he replied, “I’m just overall super gassed.”
Listen to the brand new album here!