Ben Schneider has spent his career so far steering Lord Huron through the American West. Not the Old West, necessarily, though Schneider went so far as to invent an imaginary series of Western adventure novels as part of the backstory for Lonesome Dreams, the band’s 2012 debut. The old days of horse rustlers, bandits, and broad-shouldered sheriffs are part of that mythos, of course, but Schneider is at least as interested in evoking the setting as telling the stories on Lord Huron’s latest. The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 is their most compelling effort so far, and first since 2021’s Long Lost and a surge in online popularity—thanks, mostly, to the band’s 2015 track “The Night We Met” becoming a viral audio on TikTok (it has since amassed more than 3 billion streams).
The new Lord Huron album, however, plays like a vision quest—a spiritual trek into a stark, open landscape under vast skies, where finding yourself means getting lost. Schneider’s lyrics make reference to skies full of stars on “Bag of Bones” and painted deserts on “Who Laughs Last,” an urgent, eerie song that features staticky spoken-word narration from actor Kristen Stewart. Yet the musical arrangements are what set the scene here. None of these songs are sparse, but they have an arid feel that calls to mind heat and scrubland, like a California desert of the soul. “Bag of Bones” has moments of big, glimmering electric guitars drenched in reverb, but the core of the track is hard-strummed acoustic guitar, a bouncing bassline and dusty drums. When a burst of harmonica arrives three-quarters of the way through, it’s like hearing an echo of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” wafting out of the ether. Elsewhere, steel guitar on “Nothing That I Need” shoots off like sparks rising from a campfire into the endless night, even as a mix of plucky banjo and acoustic guitars keep the song rooted to the ground.
It’s a regretful number where Schneider’s narrator sifts through the past and wishes he hadn’t made some of the decisions he did. “I threw away her love on the goddamn road / But I see her face everywhere I go,” Schneider sings, with anguish in his voice. There are no U-turns on this particular road, though, and that tension between past and present is at the heart of The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. It’s an album about fate—not in the sense of destiny, but in how we choose the paths we follow and whether we are ever fully attuned to the choices we’re making. On “Nothing That I Need,” the consequences are evident in retrospect, but that’s not always true. “Is There Anybody Out There” finds Schneider’s narrator in murkier territory as he longs to find a connection, his voice drifting through hypnotic swirls of keyboards and guitars as if he’s catching glimpses of an alluring stranger he can never quite see head-on.
Though Schneider and his bandmates—Tom Renaud, Mark Barry and Miguel Briseño—are exploring some deep themes here, the philosophical underpinnings of the album wouldn’t be nearly as compelling if the songs weren’t so musically engaging. “Watch Me Go” feels like it could be the flipside to “Nothing That I Need”—that is, someone in the midst of making a decision they will later rue—but Schneider’s deceptively buoyant vocal melody and the way the keening lead guitar contrasts with the lower sound of the spaghetti western riff makes it easy to forget about all that and live in the moment. “Fire Eternal” puts the present front and center, too, as Schneider shares vocals with Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead on a slow-burning track thick with desire, repercussions be damned.
In the end, that’s the trick, isn’t it? To lean as fully as possible into the life that unfolds before us without having the foresight to see all possible outcomes, without becoming paralyzed by indecision or second-guessing in the moment, and being willing to live with any regrets that arise along the way. It’s existential uncertainty writ large, and Lord Huron make it feel indispensable on The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. One question remains: will there be a Vol. 2?
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
