Luluc, the Australian duo of Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett, have shared No One Else’s Pen, the second single from their forthcoming sixth album Sweet Thief, out 10th July on Community Music. It follows lead single Rewarding Melody, which introduced the record in April.
Where that first track folded its dryness inside a love song, No One Else’s Pen leans fully into devotion, then sets it against the noise of everything else. “I saw this certainly as a big old love song but also paean to navigating life/love with integrity, gratitude and presence of mind,” says Hassett. Randell sings of holding steady “in defiance of all”, refusing the borrowed script: “There’s no cliché I wanna live by / No one else’s pen to write my love.”
The accompanying video, by Max Taeuschel, is built around an artwork by Fleur Rendell, a printmaker who lives and works in north-east Victoria. Rendell also made the cover image for Sweet Thief, so the song and its visual share the same hand.
Sweet Thief, the follow-up to 2023’s Diamonds, was sketched out in Brooklyn over the summer of 2024, in the studio the pair have spent the past decade building. Across ten songs it examines modernity’s shiny surface alongside the exploitation and manipulation that has crept into daily life. The writing, as ever, starts in solitude. “That space is quiet and quite isolated,” Randell explains, “but it’s where I feel deeply connected to the people I love, and also to a much broader sense of shared experience that we’ve all got. To me, that’s the most important thing about the work.”
Album Pre-order: https://stem.ffm.to/sweetthief