On Picking Petals, Lucia & the Best Boys deliver songs that walk the line between isolation and belonging, ambition and memory. Guests include Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES.
For nearly a decade, Lucia Fairfull has been building out her own space of the UK indie scene, one loud guitar and cutting pop song at a time. On Picking Petals, Lucia & the Best Boys take everything they’ve learned and turn it into something bigger, a record about roots, reinvention, and the strange pull of home.
The album is quite the evolution from the band’s 2019 debut, Burning Castles, whose streamlined, statuesque sound was built around metronomic rhythms and synth-driven pop. Picking Petals is something different. This time, Fairfull wanted to capture what happens when the band hits a stage: the volume, electricity, and barely contained energy of a live show.
That idea was spawned from years spent in the orbit of some of alternative music’s most exciting women. Lucia & the Best Boys joined Wolf Alice on the Blue Weekend tour in 2022 before opening for the Last Dinner Party. In 2024, Fairfull toured the UK and Europe alongside another Scottish icon, Shirley Manson, during Garbage’s live run. The connections built a community, a network of artists pushing one another toward something louder and ultimately weirder. In a good way.
At the heart of Picking Petals is Scotland herself. Fairfull returned north to write in weather-beaten bothies, sometimes surrounded by her bandmates and sometimes alone, using the landscape as both backdrop and creative provocation. She was equally determined to bring producer Yves Rothman into that world, opting for Glasgow’s famously atmospheric Castle of Doom Studios, the Mogwai headquarters, instead of the sunshine of Los Angeles.
The setting matters. Picking Petals sounds rooted in a place where beauty and bleakness happily share the same room. The album also expands Lucia’s musical family, with appearances from Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES and Abigail Morris of the Last Dinner Party, adding new voices to a record already built around connection. Picking Petals may ultimately sound like a coming-of-age record but for Lucia & the Best Boys, it’s something more elemental. It’s a homecoming, played at full volume.