The two previous Captured Tracks albums A Dream Is All We Know (2024) and Everything Harmony (2023) certainly indicated something of a ground zero in The Lemon Twigs’ then Cive album career. “We started making records that we would listen to ourselves,” says Michael D’Addario, the younger Twig brother, now aged 26. “We were forced to slow down and reevaluate who we were in 2020. Around that time, we tried to assess what we could do better than other groups, part icularly in the studio. The live gigs had been getting crazier and crazier, and with no prospect of playing shows we thought it was the perfect time to make something a little more delicate, and to exploit particularly Brian’s strengths. We decided to put all our efforts into making something powerful, and that’s how Everything Harmony came to be.” The album was a critic’s favourite.
By the time of A Dream Is All We Know, the future Michael classic ‘My Golden Years’, which opens the album and also received a single release and a superb video, The Lemon Twigs new era had truly begun.
And now comes the third Lemon Twigs album for Captured Tracks, Look For Your Mind!, which follows on from standalone single ‘I’ve Got A Broken Heart’ / ‘Friday (I’m Gonna Love You)’, the Cirst new release in two years, discounting Brian’s excellent solo album, Till The Morning (2025). For lovers of the slightly psychedelic / folk-rock / garage-pop that the band touched upon on their last long-player, this pairing was a delight. Would the forthcoming album follow in this style? “I think we went into the record hoping that every song was going to be in a guitar pop style,” explains Brian of their initial intentions, but being The Lemon Twigs this wasn’t going to happen. How could it?
Underneath its poppy exterior, Look For Your Mind! contains an undercurrent of paranoia and suspicion. “I do think that now is a time of insanity,” admits Brian after pausing for thought. “You really have to hold onto your own mind if you don’t wanna lose it.”
Opening with title track ‘Look For Your Mind’, a jangly Michael number, the listener is introduced to the guitar-driven harmony sound that is the centring theme of the album. Brian plays drums, bass and fuzz guitar. Michael adds the lead and rhythm guitars. Michael takes the lead, but as the song progresses the vocals are shared. Much of what was achieved on A Dream Is All We Know is here, just more laser focused. It’s classic Twigs, indebted to the golden age of guitar pop, but in no way slavish.
The distinctly optimistic teenbeat of the period is continued with Brian’s ‘2 or 3’; a bouncy pop number, where the brothers make up a two-man wrecking crew in order to construct their very own wall of sound. “When we played in Argentina, I fell asleep after the show and woke up with the chorus in my head,” says Brian. “I dreamt the melody with the lyric, so now I had to Cigure out what it was about. It concerns a guy who’s not intelligent or cultured enough for his girlfriend. We’re both always trying to write something where you can condense the meaning into a single sentence. A simple pop concept.”
‘Nothin’ But You’ returns to the Twigs in power pop mode – a style that’s nowhere near as easy to put together as the listener may think. “These types of songs are definitely tough to perfect,” states Michael. “You can go very wrong very quickly in the overdub world. It’s tempting to opt for something more complex, but it isn’t always needed. I had a chance to develop these guitar parts, three or so years ago, playing a show with Brian and Eva Chambers (Tchotchke) as The Michael D’Addario Trio. There are a few tunes on the record we did with this trio lineup.”
As well as Eva’s participation, Look For Your Mind! marks the studio debut of live Twigs Reza Matin (drums) and Danny Ayala (bass.) With the brothers previously having handled everything in the studio themselves, this offered a newfound sense of freedom. “Seven of the tunes were just Michael and I,” ponders Brian, “‘Nothin’ But You’ and ‘I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You’ had Eva joining us on bass and vocals, like on the single earlier this year. The rest of the tracks had Reza on drums, with Danny joining in on ‘Bring You Down’ and ‘You’re Still My Girl.’ They helped us finally capture that vital live sound on record.”
The album was once again recorded in the brothers’ tiny recording space in Brooklyn. “It’s pretty terrible to have more than just Brian and me there,” laughs Michael. “It’s 400 square feet and there’s nowhere to sit with all the studio equipment. You end up getting a lot done just because you wanna get the hell out of there. But we have had a lot of fun late-night jams there with Reza.”
‘Gather Round’ is one of Look For Your Mind!’s bigger productions. A Brian song with joyous orchestrations, it feels like a turn of the century campaign song. The writer is looking for an uncorrupted leader but resolves that collective action is the only way forward. Musically it’s ornate and delightfully 1967, but the mood and sentiment is distinctly 2026.
The ringing guitars of ‘I Just Can’t Over Losing You’ may create a familiarly pleasing mood, but when the bridge comes in at an unexpected time, the chorus is cut in half, and Brian and Eva’s harmonies build to its euphoric climax, the conventions for a pop song such as this are broken. The manner in which The Lemon Twigs surprise is a constant and testament to their vision and abilities. “Every time we try to write something that’s completely straightforward, we can’t help adding an element which comes out of left Cield. We always want to write a song we’ve never heard before,”chuckles Brian.
After the “unexpected expected”, a further curveball is thrown that disrupts any notion of this being yet another ’60s pop record. Brian’s ‘Fire And Gold’ starts off with a shimmering guitar riff before turning everything inside out. Brian states he was initially trying to write the kind of power pop song his brother might but compares his approach to that of Todd Rundgren’s work in the ’80s with Utopia. “You can see that he was trying to subvert the typical rock quartet form and give it more musicality because he’s just bored,” says Brian of Rundgren’s work of this time. “I was trying to write an energetic ‘Substitute’-type riff but with soulful harmonies. And then vocally, I remember listening to Paul Brady’s ‘Arthur McBride’… and other Irish folk. There’s definitely something that runs through the DNA of classic power pop, Irish folk, Indian music and Gregorian Chants. The droning quality. There are textural nods to all of these styles on this track, from the tanpura that comes in on the second verse to the vocal mantra that builds towards the end of the song.” Nothing is as straightforward as it seems with The Lemon Twigs.
Closing Side One on the vinyl record is Michael’s beautiful ballad, ‘Mean To Me’, with vocals The Beach Boys would be happy to have committed to wax 60 years ago, care of Michael, Brian and Danny.
On the flip is the stomping ‘Bring You Down’, in which Brian sings: “I’ve been working so hard every minute of the doggone day / And my rent’s gone up and the boss won’t raise my pay / I’d like to take my woman out for a night on the town / But you know that the man was made just to bring you down.”
“I was thinking of Amazon workers who get spied on and fired if they make an effort to unionise. And the push to replace the already immiserated working class with AI. Even as an artist you’re in danger of being replaced in this new world the tech oligarchs are building. In a sense it’s an old story, but it becomes more and more relevant as corporations continue to consolidate their power.”
Next the gear is dropped to the beautifully bare and heartfelt ‘Yeah I Do’, cut with Michael’s live vocal, and Brian and Reza, with only a few overdubs. “It’s a nice little capture of a performance, like how some of the [Big Star] Radio City stuff is,” says Michael. Curveball number two comes in the form of Brian’s musically dense ‘I Hurt You’, which in a more basic and youthful format could have quite easily sat on debut album Do Hollywood, with its whizzing synths and sizzling guitars.
After the jangle and Brill Building hybrid, Michael’s ‘You’re Still My Girl’, with the inclusion of Brian’s uniquely New York City Italian-American falsetto, comes Brian’s emotional epic, ‘Joy’, which he arranged with Sammy Weissberg. “I think we kind of balanced each other out,” he says of their shared duties, “because what I initially wanted was a very harmonically simple sort of George Martin orchestration sound. Sammy introduced more jazzy harmonies.” Rather than give too much away, wait until you can hear this with your eyes shut and focus. You’ll be blubbing like a baby by the end of this gorgeous production.
New things are done again with the familiar, a through line across this album, in Michael’s ‘My Heart Is In Your Hands Tonight’, resulting in harmony and crescendo, ringing guitars in The Beatles/Searchers mode and lashings of Beach Boys harmony, before the closing track, and curveball number three, ‘Your True Enemy’.
“We had stripped production back on so many of the songs, and we at Cirst approached this one the same way. It was just obvious that it needed more. Some intense processing and experimentation to put it over the top,” confirms Brian. “So we started to get more adventurous, and then we became more excited by the song.
“We put on some churchy organ to reinforce those dark descending chords, and it started taking on a more sinister tone. We threw the chorus vocals through our rotating Leslie speaker to give you a feeling of hearing the singer’s subconscious. Next, we added harsh ‘Psycho’ cellos and a fuzz/leslie guitar solo. The end vamp was a good canvas for trying out backwards sounds, so we had our dad read a Yeats poem and we ran it backwards and remodulated it… the track devolves in to a full on sonic breakdown, and is capable of scaring the mentally fragile if experienced at full blast on headphones.”
The Lemon Twigs sixth studio album is the logical next step, but it’s also much more. With the skills they’ve acquired over the last two records, their many outside productions, and time on the road, they’ve imparted a vital but disciplined spirit. At the LP’s core, as always with the Twigs, is great songwriting.
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