2024 was a pretty good year for Dean Blunt, Elias Rønnenfelt, and Vegyn. Blunt maintained status as a beloved elder millennial for zoomers who memorize Cocteau Twins songs phonetically, with his Panda Bear-featuring track "9" from 2020's Zushi going lightly viral. Iceage frontman-turned- Americana adjacent artist Rønnenfelt and electronic experimenter Vegyn both dropped solo albums — Heavy Glory and The Road To Hell is Paved With Good Intentions, respectively — that were bold and deeply personal traversals of their respective styles. Now, the three artists have come together on Blunt's new EP lucre, released on January 1 exclusively to YouTube.
Blunt has teamed up with both artists periodically throughout recent years — most recently he teamed up with Rønnenfelt on "repeat offenders" from 2024's Backstage Raver and Vegyn on "DOWNER," a track with Panda Bear from the same year. lucre turns its eye more firmly towards the last few decades of British indie music than those releases — not new territory for Blunt, exactly, but it's revitalized by a production that scans more keenly, burrows into the nooks of the vast sounds they explore a little deeper. The EP is 16-minutes long and presented as a single track, but I get the impression that we're only getting a small sampling of the exciting music this creative union produced.
