Heavier, more restless and deeply human, We’re All Going To Be Fine finds Lost in Kyiv making room for everything the title can’t promise.
At some point…, there’s a particular kind of evening when you say “That’s all right, I’m fine” because explaining the real answer would take too long. Lost in Kyiv – formerly known as Lost In Kiev, even in these pages – seem to know that evening well.
‘We’re All Going To Be Fine’ – released like its predecessors by Pelagic Records (Ef, Oh Hiroshima, PSYCHONAUT, Telepathy, The Ocean, etc.) – is a reassuring title with a question hiding inside it. How do you know? What if you’re not fine yet? The French post-rock (or post-whatever, forget the subgenres for 5 minutes) quartet don’t try to settle the matter. They make space to sit with it, turn it up loud, and see where it takes you.
If you’ve spent time with ‘Nuit Noire’, you may remember how personal that record could feel, even when it left much of its story untold. This album reaches for something similarly intimate, though its sound has changed. Under their updated name (because you know…), and with Jérémie Legrand now behind the drums, Lost in Kyiv bring more groove and weight into the room. The guitars still have that wide, cinematic pull. They’re joined by bass you can feel in your chest, restless electronics and riffs that arrive when the music can no longer keep a lid on things.
“Enlightened” opens with restraint. It feels like the moment before a difficult conversation, when you already know what needs saying. “Burst” answers with force, but the heaviness never feels thrown in for effect. Lost in Kyiv have a good ear for the space around a riff: how long to hold back, when to let the rhythm take over, when to leave a little air in the mix. “Mantra” and “Eclipse” keep changing the pressure, finding unease in a glitchy detail or a thickening layer of sound before letting it spill over.
The band have said they wanted to look inward this time, towards mental health, the human psyche and the complicated relationship we have with ourselves. Those ideas can be hard to put into words without making them smaller. Instrumental music gives Lost in Kyiv another way in. A passage can feel anxious one minute and strangely comforting the next. You get to decide what it brings up for you.
Rebecca Need-Menear’s (i Häxa…) voice on “Becoming” is especially affecting in that context. After so much emotion carried through guitars, drums and electronics, hearing a voice feels like someone has finally stepped into the room. Then “Euphoria” picks up the pace and keeps moving until it seems to wonder where it’s going. That turn is one of the album’s finest moments.
By the time “Liminality” closes with a sample of Carl Gustav Jung – one of the fathers of modern psychology – there’s no tidy answer waiting at the end. Honestly, that feels right. Most of us know the difference between being told everything will be okay and believing it.
Somewhere between bands such as 65daysofstatic, God Is An Astronaut, If These Trees Could Talk, Maybeshewill or We Lost The Sea, Lost in Kyiv don’t ask you to believe the title on the first listen. They take you through the noise, let you feel the full weight of it, and leave the possibility open. Some days, that’s enough.
