On the cover of Lord Huron's Strange Trails, trees are dripped with Spanish moss and the font is jagged and creepy — it looks like a pulp novel. Before trying his hand at music, Ben Schneider was a visual artist, and that's his handiwork on the album cover. Similarly, Lord Huron's songs spin around a strong visual theme, with an imagined cast of characters.
"That's the way I kind of envisioned it: There are all these separate tales from this world," Schneider says. "But they overlap and they tangle. And they collide sometimes."
For Strange Trails, Schneider creates a dark, apocalyptic world, filled with people rising from the dead and howling through the dark. At the audio link, Schneider tells NPR's Melissa Block about the leather-jacketed greaser gang in "The World Ender," a song brought to life in a comic book that accompanies the album.
There's also Buck Vernon, a "washed-up rockabilly country singer," who narrates "Fool For Love," and Frankie Lou, a "lounge singer who performs at this club called George's Place," who sings "Love Like Ghosts." Lord Huron even throws a party for the end of the world in "Until The Night Turns," written from the perspective of Johnny, a member of the greaser gang.
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