Formed over a decade ago, The Lemon Lovers arrive at ZDB after a European tour that took in Luxembourg, Holland, France, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Italy, among others, where they ventured onto the stage with a line-up of six musicians. João Pedro Silva and Victor Butuc have always been at the heart of the project, and have dreamt of different places for their music over the course of several albums and EPs. Even with the future, or a form of future.

“pretend that i care”, from 2021, is the latest release, recorded in the middle of a pandemic and with a malaise of those who don’t want to live the present: it is the musicians themselves who define the album with a suffering by anticipation, writing about problems that are to come. These are words that define the times, being uncertain, one invents for the future what is difficult to face in the present. A form of survival, contrary to what it seems, that goes against conformism. This perhaps explains The Lemon Lovers’ permanent will to change and to be constantly in search of more, better.

Where does an album that anticipates the evils live? Curiously, in the past, inhabited by ghosts, embracing sounds that evoke memories, with arrangements that are sometimes reminiscent of The Last Shadow Puppets or Frightened Rabbit. A sound they aspired to and sought after, mastering the themes at Magic Garden Studios, in Los Angeles, Brian Lucey’s studio, who has worked with the Arctic Monkeys, The Black Keys and The Last Shadow Puppets. The voice seems to come from another place, ruminating between memory and this so-called presence of future suffering, and occupies songs with an emptiness desperate to be filled. But that past, or memory, that exists in the music of these The Lemon Lovers is the kind that inspires musicians, songwriters, rock to explore sensations, times, imaginaries they have not inhabited. The future, or anticipated suffering, is not science fiction, but a place that they themselves imagine where they can exist and that they make happen on stage. AS