In the early days of L.S. Dunes, the band described their name as standing for “low stress”. Born out of pandemic-era creativity – voice notes, group chats, and late-night home recordings – the project offered its members a much-needed artistic escape, which eventually culminated in their debut album, ‘Past Lives’. But now, as they prepare to release their highly anticipated follow-up, ‘Violet’, Frank Iero and Tucker Rule can’t help but laugh when asked if L.S. Dunes still lives up to its “low stress” mantra.
“I think we were hoping if I say this enough, it’ll be true,” Frank laughs. “Anytime you really care about something, there’s gonna be a stress level. Anytime you write something and put it out there, and you’re like, ‘Oh God damn, I really love this so much, it’s gotta be great. It’s gotta be presented perfectly. It’s gotta be played perfectly. It’s gotta be toured,’ then the stress does come in. And I think that the real stress of Dunes is that everyone is so busy, so it’s finding the time to dedicate and that we’re all around to share in it.”
“But as far as like the writing process – that creative process – that’s still low stress, that shit’s so fucking easy. It’s really the easiest fucking creative band I’ve ever been in my life. It just flows. It’s fucking nuts.”
So when you bring Anthony Green, Travis Stever, and Tim Payne into the room with Tucker and Frank, the creative process remains undeniably low-stress. Unfortunately, the dream of an entirely easy ride in L.S. Dunes has been disrupted as their other bands, projects, and commitments have begun to pull them in multiple directions.
Thankfully, when they are together, magic happens. After boundless time and opportunity to make their debut album, they tested if they could replicate it in person when they headed to Joshua Tree and the legendary Rancho De La Luna studio with a completely blank slate and shared ambition. The result was the blistering ‘Benadryl Subreddit’ and the ethereal ‘Old Wounds’, which “didn’t exist in the ether” (as Frank puts it) before they arrived at the studio. They trusted one another and, within just a few days, turned around two complete songs. It was a critical moment that proved their first album was no fluke and, when under more intense circumstances, they could still find that L.S. Dunes magic.
With the arrival of ‘Violet’, L.S. Dunes return with an album that builds on their solid foundations of ‘Past Lives’. Expanding their sonic dimensions while flipping the emotional toil of the debut album in favour of more hope and light, this album showcases the band’s evolution while retaining the raw energy and authenticity that made ‘Past Lives’ so devastating.
Pioneering some of the starkest shifts on ‘Violet’ is Anthony Green. His despair, his depression, had a stranglehold on much of ‘Past Lives’. Having found his way to a better place in his life, Anthony’s songwriting on ‘Violet’ radiates with optimism. The singer has even spoken about the difficulty of performing ‘Sleep Cult’, the closer on their first album, in which he confesses, “Sorry that I wish that I was dead.”
“That’s a very hard thing for someone to say if they’re not feeling that anymore,” Tucker reasons. Anthony’s renewed positivity seems shared throughout the band too, with Frank noting that they were collectively in a better place when writing this record. He adds that the overarching songwriting on ‘Violet’ captures the “inherent feeling that things can get better if you want them to and if you strive for it.”
“That creative process – that shit’s so fucking easy”
For those who understand and believe in energies, mindfulness, and spiritual vibrations, ‘Violet’ is the perfect title for this record. In a spiritual sense, the colour symbolises the highest vibration in the visual spectrum. It also represents the future and imagination while serving as a symbol of artistic daring and counterculture. It all fits. However, the title wasn’t a deliberate choice but rather a word that found them.
“That started as a placeholder in my mind when I wrote the song,” Frank explains. “I tend to get hung up on syllable sounds, especially when writing lyrics and things of that nature, and when I was playing along to the song, I started to hum, and one of the words that came through was ‘violet’ in the course of that song.”
“Now, in the final version, Anthony doesn’t say that at all, but it was the placeholder title that I gave the demo, and as we started to write more for the record and think about things for the record and think about artwork and what it meant, it just kept coming back up.”
“Tucker had found some articles about certain light sources, and what violet represented, and what the flower represented and all these things that just kept popping up in all these things that we were doing and everything that was surrounding the creative process to the record.”
“And sometimes the universe kind of tells you what it is and what it needs to be. And so, ‘violet’ really ended up becoming so much more than just a thing that I mumbled on a recording. It’s kind of funny,” he smiles.
Another major change for this album was that the songs were built with Anthony in mind. The singer first joined L.S. Dunes with many of the songs for ‘Past Lives’ structurally complete.
“I think that had to have been the hardest part of ‘Past Lives’, that we wrote a lot of the songs without a vocal or vocal melody in mind,” Frank admits.
“So Anthony really had to shoehorn in what he was saying, what he was singing, and he did it fucking beautifully, but that shit is hard to do.”
“This time around was very much us knowing the members of the band and leaving space and working together on that for the best final product, and I think it really did pay off.”
“Violet became so much more than just a thing I mumbled”
Fittingly, almost as a marker of this change in Anthony’s involvement, ‘Violet’ opens with only his vocals on ‘Like Magick’, with the rest of the band gradually enveloping him instead.
The track had been one that Anthony had been playing solo on tour, opening for Thursday, so Tucker already had a few ideas of what he would bring to it, given the opportunity. For Frank, however, hearing ‘Like Magick’ was the eureka moment he needed to bring the entire album into focus.
“I need to know where the record starts and how it ends before I can really realise it in my head,” Frank explains.
“I knew what the end was gonna be. I had that in my head, like, ‘Alright, this song ‘Forgiveness’ has gotta be the last track.’ However, for the life of me, I didn’t think we had a track one, and that was killing me. Without that track one, you don’t have a record, and so when Anthony brought in the beginnings of ‘Like Magick’, it was just like ‘Oh my God! This is it! This is what we’ve been missing’. And then everything kind of fell into place from there.”
It was a moment indicative of this album’s improved spirit of collaboration. Each member, with their own infinite wisdom, could put their heads together in service of the song they were creating. From the early demos, songs like the single ‘Machines’ and the cathartic fanfare of ‘Forgiveness’ each underwent some sort of adaptation.
While some bands find friction when it comes to competing ideas and collaboration, both Frank and Tucker attest to their experience on ‘Violet’ being a meeting of minds rather than a competition for the best idea.
“That’s how I like to do music, like more of a feeling than it is something that I’m trying to shoehorn,” Tucker explains of how his “best guess” approach is about what is in service of the idea brought to him.
“Tucker’s first best guesses are always so on point it’s like it’s uncanny how his instinct for beats and for rhythms work within these songs. It’s crazy,” Frank compliments and recalls half an idea he had for a song on ‘Violet’, which Tucker transformed. “I was like ‘I don’t know. I think this is butt rock. I don’t think it’s gonna be very good,’” he remembers, but a bit of Tucker magic turned the idea around.
Tucker fires back with the other side of the coin, “If I did send back the drum take and it was a different one we thought, and everybody hated it, it would be fine. We would just change it,” he concedes.
“Nobody’s like super proud of something so much that it’s like, ‘No, that’s the way it is’ because it’s not. It’s an agreeable thing to make it the best it can be.”
“It’s still funny to me how rare a quality that is in other bands,” Frank adds.
“That’s why this band is so fucking fun and easy to create in because everyone does feel that way. There are no egos involved in that shit. It’s always in service of the song, like ‘What’s best for the song?’” he continues.
“And also, how can we impress each other?” Tucker adds.
There are plenty of moments where they’ve impressed one another on this album. Frank points to Tucker’s work on “I Can See It Now…” for which the guitarist watched on, bamboozled. Tucker points to Travis’s work on ‘Like Magick’ with his huge, theatrical guitar solo.
“You don’t expect that to come in,” he beams. “That’s an important part of the record, too, because that’s where you know all bets are off. You think you know one thing about where this record’s going, and all of a sudden when that comes in… I think that it really takes the listener hostage and takes them by surprise.”
“It makes you feel unsafe because you don’t know what’s about to happen,” he gushes. “It lets the band go anywhere it wants to go after that.”
And it’s not just what that solo symbolises for introducing new ideas and sounds for L.S. Dunes but also a personal milestone for Tucker. He continues, “I’ve always wanted to be a part of a band that has like a ripping solo on one part, and it’s here, it’s arrived, and I couldn’t have asked for a better situation for it to be in.”
In the same vein, Frank says of the title-track and the closing track ‘Forgiveness’, “Those songs might be some of my favourite songs that I’ve ever had a hand in writing.”
Tucker describes the title track, a song which sustains an intense, raw, emotional power, as “the complete acme of the record.”
He recalls, “I remember going into the studio in the morning after Anthony had spent the night doing vocals with Will [Yip – the producer], and he was just like vibrating. Like he couldn’t wait for us to hear it. And, sometimes, in that situation, somebody plays it up so much that you’re disappointed, but, truly, I think I could speak for all of us when we heard it, we were just like, ‘Holy fucking shit! Now we’re all vibrating’.”
It’s apparent just how excited they both are about this album. Here are two artists who have written albums like ‘War All the Time’ and ‘The Black Parade’ – yet they state ‘Violet’ as one of their finest achievements as artists.
“I think it needs to be said just how proud I am of this fucking record,” Frank says. “Even though I was there and I witnessed it being made, and I had a hand in it being made, I’m still in shock of all that went into this record from everybody involved and how impressed I am with everyone’s performance on it.
“It’s one of my favourite records I’ve ever done. I just I fucking love it so much, not even just as somebody that made it, but as a fan of everybody involved, too. I can’t express that enough.”
Tucker joins in, sharing his pride, too, “It’s been the most special time of my life, and this record really just reinforces that.”
That’s all the “low stress” part – the making of ‘Violet’. On the horizon, though, the rest of 2025 is looking tricky for L.S. Dunes. Aside from a handful of headline shows around the album’s release – dates sandwiched between shows on Rise Against’s tour – there isn’t much booked in so far for Dunes. Thursday have shows. My Chemical Romance have an anniversary tour. Coheed and Cambria are active here and there. Anthony is never short of a show with one band or another. L.S. Dunes are going to have to fight to get ‘Violet’ heard live this year.
“I don’t think that our band is going to be the type of a band that comes around every three weeks and plays your city – as much as we might want to do that because we have so much fun doing it and playing in this band – it’s just not feasible,” Frank admits.
“So, when we do come and we do play, we make it an event, and I think that it’s worth coming to see.”
Tucker, who is already disappointed to be missing some Thursday shows in favour of Dunes gigs, adds that future L.S. performances might not always feature their full contingent.
“We do it because we want to, we believe in it, and we love it. It actually gives us hope”
So therein lies the stress of L.S. Dunes – finding the shows in which they can all play together. In the first instance, Tucker is playing with Dunes over Thursday this winter because they will be the ‘Violet’ release shows. From there, though, the decisions get harder.
“As musicians and artists, you always want to play your newest stuff. That’s the stuff you’re most proud of at the moment. That’s your baby at the time, so going back and playing these old songs, sometimes the idea is not that fun,” Tucker reasons despite having very recently played some 25-year anniversary shows for Thursday’s ‘Waiting’ album.
Frank, however, disagrees as he is looking ahead to a huge summer of stadium shows in celebration of ‘The Black Parade’. “I guess like with My Chem, when we do anniversary shows, we like to reinvent some stuff here and there,” Frank says.
“We take those old songs as a blueprint and be like, ‘Alright, cool, like this was the record, but how would we approach that stuff now as the musicians that we are now?’ So for us, I think in order to stay interested in it, we have to still stay creative.”
They’re differing viewpoints but part of the same idea: they both want to be pushing themselves creatively.
Tucker concedes there are some benefits to playing anniversary shows, even if it’s just as a marker of how far he has come in the last 20-something years. “It teaches me, and I’m gonna teach my kid this,” he says, “is you gotta invest in yourself at a young age because it does pay off.”
“I agree with that,” Frank nods. “And also believing in yourself, even at that young age and not settling, even when you don’t think anyone’s paying attention, you never know what’s gonna happen 10 – 20 years down the line.
“So, never settle, always strive, reach for the stars, and you never know, man. Also, how fucking rad to create something and have it live on past you, you know what I mean? Not that you’re gone,” he laughs and tries to recover. “Eventually, you know, we’re all… we’re all in here for a limited amount of time, but the shit that we create is eternal, and to have people listen to that, like to have new audiences discovering that is… it’s fucking crazy, man.”
In essence, that’s what makes L.S. Dunes so special. These are seasoned, professional artists with the energy, creativity, and enthusiasm of a band just cutting their teeth. They’re already excited and planning what comes next. They’re ready to see where the songs on ‘Violet’ will take them live. They’re doing it all because they love it.
“We always talk about the idea that we don’t have to be here,” Tucker explains. “We don’t have to be doing this band, and I’m not talking monetarily wise. We’re all busy enough that this is crazy that we’re trying to even juggle all of this stuff, but we do it because we want to, and we believe in it, and we love it, and it actually gives us hope, and it gives us the will to move on and push forward and stay creative.”
So whether they’re Low Stress Dunes or not, it doesn’t matter anymore. The “real world” stresses are left behind when they’re in the room together, and creativity and collaboration flourish. The music that comes from that is to behold as some of their finest work yet. It’s very special. It’s like magick.
L.S. Dunes’ album ‘Violet’ is out 31st January.
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