LUX INTERNA

NEW WILDERNESS GOSPEL / THIRD SINGLE RELEASE

Dear Friends,

We’re excited to share the third and final single from New Wilderness Gospel before the album drops on May 2nd.

Desert-warm and night-soaked, “No Arrow” shows another side of Lux Interna—one that’s slower-burning, perhaps a bit more vulnerable, but no less fierce; it’s a torch song for haunted highways and long over-due reckonings. 

Kathryn has created a video that perfectly captures the intimate atmosphere of the song. You can watch it and listen below.

As always, thank you for your support — it means the world to us!

Yours,

Joshua & Kathryn

No Arrow

Official Video by Kathryn Ian

PRESS PLAY

In “No Arrow,” a tangle of voices and moments meet, intertwine, and transform each other. Here, it’s always 4:00 a.m. You’re stepping out of the roadside bar as the desert winds gently stipple flickering red neon with a thousand grains of sand and the lights from the town in the valley shimmer like ghosts in the darkness below.

Or perhaps you’re waking up in the Mojave heat and lighting a cigarette in a motel bed as you watch your sleeping lover bathed in shadows and the shards of electric light that creep in through the holes in the curtains.

Or maybe you’re still driving, tired but full of flame, as the car’s headlights are continuously humbled by the vastness of a great nocturnal kingdom.

Whichever way it is — your body is awake now. A beautiful animal of flesh and fire. It feels like everything that came before led right here, to this moment.

But you know that he’s out there, waiting and watching. And there’s a cold and calculating malice in his eyes. This thought used to terrify you. You would have done anything to shake him off your trail. But not anymore. Now you’re ready. You welcome the encounter.

Now he’s the one that best beware.

LUX INTERNA

NEW WILDERNESS GOSPEL / SECOND SINGLE RELEASE

34.15612680821995, -115.9833836950029

Dear Friends,

We hope this finds each of you weaving your own secret worlds of wonder, despite the disenchanted—and deeply disenchanting—state of things. In times like these, may we all do our part in taking good care of each other.

We’d like to take a moment to thank you all for your support, kind words, and interest in Lux Interna—it really means the world to us. And a special heartfelt thanks to those who’ve pre-ordered the album. After a prolonged period of being hermits, it’s been incredible to share our music, make new friends, and reconnect with old ones.

I’ll keep this brief (a rare feat for me) because we want to share our second single, Like Wolves. Take a listen, hit reply, and let us know what you think. Below, you’ll find the official lyric video, along with a raw, intimate recording—one of the very first times we played the song through, back when it was still taking shape. This is the first time we shared this acoustic version, so you’re the first to hear it! 

Thank you for listening.

Much love,

Joshua & Kathryn

Like Wolves

Official Lyric Video by Kathryn Ian

PRESS PLAY

Like Wolves is an invocation of hunger, wildness, and transformation—a spiritual howl in the dark. Both a love song and a battle cry, it haunts the liminal space between sainthood and savagery, where the sacred and the profane tangle together in the fever of the desert night.

Written on a restless road trip through the Mojave, the song channels the energy of its vast expanses and all-night dives. Headlights cut through dust; a neon cross flickers in the distance; static-soaked blues haunt the radio waves with warnings from the past.

Like Wolves swaggers forward with a warped vision of reverbed 1960s surf guitars, soaring strings, lurching Shangri-Las-esque basslines, and hypnotic rhythms, swerving recklessly between darkness and light, desire and devotion, before converging in an ecstatic embrace of a truth beyond all dualisms.

This song is about learning to look unflinchingly into the fiercer face of love—learning to be truly alive. While wandering the high desert, we spent time in the company of wolves at a rescue shelter. Though exiled from their native lands, they remained untamed—ferociously alive, alight with something far wilder than mere survival. Looking into their eyes, we saw the same fire we sought to feed within us. This song translates sparks of that fire into sound.

When your world starts to fall apart, you're forced to make a choice—capitulate or create. Either submit, or bare your teeth and let the wild in. But first, you have to find the space within yourself that is still feral, still free.

LUX INTERNA

ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT / FIRST SINGLE RELEASE

New Wilderness Gospel

May 2, 2025 | 2 CD Book | Vinyl | Digital

Dear Friends,

I’m thrilled to announce that our forthcoming album, New Wilderness Gospel, will be released by Auerbach Tonträger on May 2, 2025, as a gatefold double LP (black & limited blue marble editions) and in a deluxe 72-page artbook edition.

This release is more than an album—it is the first installation of a larger multimedia project, weaving music, text, and visual art into an emergent world.

The artbook edition features:

• Lyrics & extensive liner notes

• Polaroid and 35mm photographs by Kathryn

• Ten chapters from an experimental novel by Joshua

• A fully scored audiobook of the text

Today, we mark the first threshold—the unveiling of our inaugural single, “Into Night,” and a meditational lyric video crafted by Kathryn.

Kathryn and I are so grateful to have been joined by an incredible community of musicians on this release.

At the heart of New Wilderness Gospel are the ever-present voices of myself, Kathryn, and Kris T. Force (Amber Asylum, AEAEA). But this album also bears the fingerprints of many gifted hands, and we want to recognize the extraordinary artists who helped bring it to life:

Jackie Perez Gratz (Grayceon, Amber Asylum)
Jeff Linsenmaier (Wovenhand, Czars, Keith Urban)
Tim Gotch (Sleepbomb)
Adam Torruella

Each of them brought something singular, something luminous, something essential to this work. We are over the moon about what we’ve created together—and we can’t wait to share it with you.

On that note, we’d also like to offer our sincere thanks to those who were part of the recording, mixing, and mastering — Jack Shirley (Atomic Gardens), Doug White (Watchmen Studios), and Tim Green (Louder).

There is much to share, so we’ll get right to it: below, you’ll find exclusive details on New Wilderness Gospel.

And as always, we love hearing from you—be a stranger to the world, but not to us. 

Wishing you inner light in this dark night of dark nights,

Joshua

“Into Night”

Lyric Video by Kathryn Ian

PRESS PLAY

“Into Night” is the oceanic heart of New Wilderness Gospel. Musically, it weaves together many of the diverse tones and textures that define the album; lyrically, it captures a pivotal moment of transformation in the narrative arc. 

Written in our mountain cabin in Northern California during a series of severe and unrelenting storms, the piece attempts to capture the uncanny blurring and blending of inner and outer landscapes that can occur during periods of prolonged absence from anthropocentric environments. In this world, the trees sway madly, their branches wave and scrape and scratch wildly against the thick hide of the night sky; it feels as though they’d tear the moon down for company if they could. Then the static of the storm and the howls of the wind slowly coagulate into music. Into a message. And the whiskey in your glass conspires with the torrential rain to wash away the illusion of chronological time. 

Here, St. John’s “dark night of the soul” opens up to an even older, wilder darkness. And in this darkness, a pure, sparkling moment of presence. God is there. And the dead are alive again. And the night reveals its hidden face as mercy, as the possibility of redemption. Or so the old mountain stories would have it—but who knows how reliable those storytellers are? They certainly spend too much time alone in the deep woods to be trusted!

New Wilderness Gospel | Deluxe 72-page Artbook edition with bonus disc featuring an experimental audiobook

The Origin of New Wilderness Gospel

A close friend of ours floated the phrase “deconstructed cinema” to describe NWG, and we think that’s pretty accurate – we’ve endeavored to provide many ways into the wilderness, but it’s up to the individual imagination to create a map – no experience of the wilderness should be the same! We’ll continue to offer more pathways into the wilderness here, so stay tuned.

The last few decades have seen a flurry of cultural production on the theme of “ecological apocalypse” in the sense of cataclysm, mass extinction, or end-of-the-world scenarios. The album, New Wilderness Gospel, is part of a larger ongoing multimedia work that envisions an anthropocenic apocalypse of a more complex nature by returning to the premodern notion of apocalypse as an act of "uncovering" or "revelation" (apokalyptein) as well as a crisis.

We wrote and recorded the album during a time defined by encounters with massive forces of destruction far beyond our control—the global pandemic, forest fires in Northern California, and the extreme polarization of American society—as well as personal struggles with depression and economic precarity. In short, it was a deeply unsettling time. But to borrow a line from Emerson: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

When your world begins to fall apart, you’re forced to make a choice—capitulate or create! Either you let meaning slowly bleed out of your life or you start gathering the sparks of significance that remain and set about the task of dreaming up a new mythology, constructing shelters that can withstand the harsh weather of the present, and building alternate bridges between the past and the future. But first you must find a space within yourself that is still wild, a place that hasn’t been “settled”—and therefore dominated—by the values and world-making forces of the society you are embedded within.

This song cycle is part of a larger project of world-building in a more-than-metaphorical sense. The songs are populated by voices, characters, and landscapes that echo our own lives and the lives of those we are entwined with, and yet, in our understanding, also possess their own independent reality. New Wilderness Gospel is both an attempt to build a home amidst the storm and to throw the doors wide open to the wildness of the future.

We hope to cross paths with you somewhere in this wild territory!

LUX INTERNA

SIGNING ANNOUNCEMENT

Photo of Lux Interna by Bobby Cochran

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year from the Lux Interna camp! We hope all of you are faring well despite the general state of the world at large. It’s been a long stretch of radio silence—much longer than we anticipated—but that’s all about to change.

We’re thrilled to share some exciting news: Lux Interna has signed a multi-album deal with Prophecy Productions and will be releasing a new full-length as well as a full album of bonus material in 2025. Check out the official press release from Prophecy. 

Your support over the years has meant the world to us, and we hope this year brings opportunities to reconnect with many of you—our extended Lux Interna family.

So, here’s to entering the new wilderness— the journey begins!

We’ll be sharing exclusive updates on our forthcoming album, behind-the-scenes stories, and more right here, so stay tuned.

And don't hesitate to reach out. We always appreciate connecting with interesting folks like yourselves!

Much love & all good things for 2025,

Joshua & Kathryn