While you’re reading this, Mourning Routine’s Lucas Kamal is a little nervous about his future. He’s leaving behind his teenage years and entering college, facing all the anxiety, alienation, and struggles of that crucial post-high school time.
Mourning Routine’s debut EP, Hello, From Earth, captures this time of floating between adolescence and adulthood with heart-on-his-sleeve earnestness and ultra-catchy, post-punk tinged indie rock.
Mourning Routine is a solo project with Lucas singing, producing, writing all the songs, and playing all the instruments except drums, which were handled by his buddy PJ Hughes.
Lucas’s rich crooning vocals, vulnerable lyrics, driving melodic bass lines, and chiming guitars recall the 1980s new wave and arty punk his father loved. But for Lucas, the early 2000s onslaught of post-punk revivalists like Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, and Interpol were the transformative music he calls his own.
Growing up in Orlando, Florida, in a house where classic rock was The Cure, Talking Heads, and The Clash, it’s only natural Lucas would seek out arty, accessible, and emotive sounds when forming his own musical tastes.
Today Glide is excited to premiere “Too Much” the EP’s dreamy first single. Set to a soundtrack of airy slacker rock guitar and a quick, almost danceable drumbeat, “Too Much” finds Lucas making a poignant and powerfully personal statement on coming of age when unrest at home combined with pressures from school can be overwhelming. Lucas’s emotionally vulnerable vocals float over the music, bringing to mind Interpol and The Killers as well as the Smiths and The Cure. For such a young artist, the song finds Lucas demonstrating a maturity both in his lyrics and his ability to craft tight indie rock.
Lucas Kamal describes the inspiration behind the tune:
“’Too Much’ was conceived on an extra gloomy Florida day while I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my guitar in my lap, plugged into my iPad. I vividly remember realizing that I wrote the lyrics on the back of my calculus homework, and dreading the embarrassment to follow the next day when my teacher would without a doubt call me out on it.
This song is a product of one of the lowest points in my life. Between trying to figure out who I am as a person, and dealing with numerous social pressures and stressors, the egregious monotony that my day-to-day life turned into spiraled me downward into a miserable mess. So naturally, like any other indie teen with a guitar, I wrote a song about it (and I might have used a chorus pedal. Ew).
Finally putting this song out there is both surreal and terrifying for me, but after a year and a half of writing, re-writing, recording, I think it’s time for someone else to give it a listen.”
LISTEN:
Photo credit: Olivia Sher
