Lucy Kruger & the Lost Boys on less is more songwriting and new album Pale Bloom

Lucy Kruger is the South African singer, songwriter, sonic-explorer, and frontwoman of her namesake band, Lucy Kruger & the Lost Boys. Upon realising her art-pop noise songs were unlikely to lead to a financially feasible future in her home country, she moved to Berlin and became a full-time musician. She chats to Headliner about her new album Pale Bloom, which is lavished with guitar feedback, violas, sparse arrangements, and haunting melodies, and about her 2026 touring plans.

Kruger and her Lost Boys have been hitting the road hard for the last six years, appearing at festivals such as The Great Escape and Focus Wales in the UK, SXSW in the States, and dozens of European ones also. In 2023, the band secured the Europavox Spotlight Prize, leading to five showcase festivals across the EU, and Kruger was then shortlisted as a participant of Keychange, an international network with the goal of gender equality in the music industry. The new album is another excellent showcase for Kruger’s talents, with instrumental arrangements that are somehow equally sparse and lush, progressive guitar playing, and her unique and ambient vocals.

How’s life in Berlin? It’s such a great place to be an artist and a musician, but its draw as an affordable city is under threat from rising rents and living costs…

I moved in 2018, so it has been a while. It’s a bit shocking to me how quickly time goes. Coming from South Africa, there’s very little funding structure there, definitely not for the kind of music that I’m making. Comparatively, Berlin is amazing. I’ve been a full-time musician since I moved here, which would not have happened very easily in South Africa. But in Berlin, Funding is getting cut, rent is going up, and the pressure mounts. I think art is very necessary, but it’s a difficult time to be an artist.

In terms of big cities, it is still much cheaper than London or New York. Mostly, I didn’t get part-time work because of my visa, but what I noticed here is that it’s possible to get a side job for a reasonable income, allowing you enough time to practice your art. That isn’t the case in South Africa.

Before relocating to Germany, what did your early days of music in South Africa look like?

I used to love performing a lot, and when I was about 16, my now sister-in-law started to play guitar. I saw her writing her own songs, and I somehow got introduced to Joni Mitchell's album Blue. I guess it was a coming-of-age moment as well, where you are starting to experience slightly stickier feelings that are harder to articulate. There was this woman singing songs in my bedroom through my little boombox; it was a revelatory moment with regard to how I could use this thing that I love to do, which was singing, to explore my own experience and to express something quite personal.

I started to play little shows just on acoustic guitar. When I moved to Cape Town after university, I asked a family friend if he wanted to play in my band, because he was literally the only musician I knew — he said yes and became one of the Lost Boys. We organised a couple of tours on our own and realised, because the visa situation is quite complicated, that we couldn't do it in a sustainable way. We needed to relocate. Logistically, Berlin just made the most sense. The UK is not an option at all because they're very unwilling to allow a South African passport holder with no money into their country. Once I moved, I had to find my new Lost Boys.

In the early days, did the project feel more like a solo project than a band?

I actually released an album in 2012 where I worked with producers. I didn't know anything about making an album, and I went to the professionals. In the end, I don't know if it was the most meaningful way to move through the process, because I realised when I listened to it that the songs were mine, but it didn't sound anything like me. That is when I found some friends to start this project with, because I needed to find my own voice. They were very influential, and so in that sense, it's never really been a solo thing.

You’re a great example of an artist who has built an income stream using Patreon; could you share your experience with that?

Artists are having to find different ways to find income because music streaming pays so little, and Patreon has been good for me. I started it during Covid as a way to find income, but also as a way to have a more grounded and constant conversation with an audience. More than anything, it’s a sort of tender deadline for continuing to create. I think the reason I've been able to release with the consistency that I have is because of Patreon. It keeps you in the practice of sharing and writing with an audience so you're not just sending stuff into the void.

Congratulations on releasing your seventh album, Pale Bloom. One of the early singles was Anchor, a great example of the minimalism on this album. How did that one come to be?

I was experimenting with sketches on a computer, trying to think more along the lines of making very simple beats and what would come from writing from that place. I used to only write with my guitar as the source, and I play guitar in a particular kind of way. With these songs, I just made very basic beats that I liked, and then I wrote from that. When you're composing on the computer, even if it's very minimal or simple production, that becomes the seed of the feeling of the piece for me; I get attached to it, and so that often ends up staying, and stuff gets built around that. I don't like too much stuff on a song in general — saying the most with the least amount of things is my preference.

Which DAW did you use, and how did you go about making those song sketches?

I'm working with Logic, and there is so much that you can just drag in that's pre-made, especially now in the AI world. But the problem is, if I do that, there's too much information there to work with, and I feel a bit lost. So I do it in an extremely juvenile way where I will take a kick drum and then the hi-hat, add a very basic delay, and then that creates some kind of little moment. It's like typing with one finger. Once there's something there that I can work with, I try to move from there, especially because with this record, I wanted to take it to the band, so I didn't want to fill it too much since all the songs also have live kits.

Our latest single, Damp, was quite different. I wrote it on the acoustic guitar, and then Liu, our guitarist, took the stems and completely changed it. It's quite amazing to me to feel what the song became, because we've been playing that song live for a little while now, and it's become the most driving song that started from the least driving place. I couldn't get that out with the original guitar demo at all. It was almost too vulnerable; sometimes people don't want to get too close to that kind of state because it feels too exposed. This offers a kind of backbone, so you're safe enough to absorb the fragile part of it.

You’re on the road a fair bit this year; what’s the Lucy Kruger & the Lost Boys live experience like?

If I were of a financially sound mind, I wouldn’t take the full band to the UK and around Europe, but the music doesn't really make sense when I've tried to do it stripped back. So we'll be with the whole band. The live experience makes so much sense to me; it feels very intense and alive, and I hope it's the same for the audience. I believe in it somehow. I'm very proud of my band; I think they're amazing, and the players are very special. It makes me very proud to know that I give these people room to express themselves because I would be happy to watch each and every one of them for each moment of the show. Their playing is so meaningful to me.