Lore [Vinyl 2LP]

Laura Reed and Laur Joamets are LORE, a genre-bending Nashville duo mixing elements of metal, grunge, blues, and rock into raw, electric Americana anthems. Pairing Reed’s gruff, bluesy alto wail with Joamets’s effortlessly agile guitar, LORE’s satisfying fusion feels completely attuned to the current moment: part smooth sailing, part careening chaos.

South African native Reed started songwriting as a street musician, later collaborating with funk icons George Clinton and Karl Denson before launching her solo career. In 2019 while recording a solo project at Sputnik Sound, she met Joamets, a classically trained Estonian guitarist who’d toured with Sturgill Simpson and Drivin N Cryin and was recording an instrumental record. The pair formed a natural partnership based on a shared love for roots, blues, and gritty rock’n’roll. By 2020, they’d combined their separate projects into one.

LORE’s soulful mid-tempo debut single “Surrender” premiered on Rolling Stone in October 2020, followed by the buoyant, anarchic “Gifts of Destruction and Disorder” in December. In October 2021 they released “I Walk Alone,” a driving, intimate track evoking the rough-but-delicate sound of Karen Dalton, and in November dropped “Woven,” a bracing psychedelic-grunge tune with howling vocals and revolving guitar riffs. Lore’s debut album, co-produced by the band with Vance Powell (Jack White, Chris Stapleton) and Dave Schools (Widespread Panic, Hard Working Americans), is set for release in spring 2022.