“We’ll find our way.” When Son Lux founder Ryan Lott sings these four words near the outset of his band’s propulsive ninth album, Out Into, he’s making a vow, charting a course, advancing a philosophy, sealing a promise. 

What happens next? Lott and his bandmates —  guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and percussionist Ian Chang — plunge themselves into the most rhythmically sumptuous, lyrically urgent Son Lux album yet. Across nearly two decades, Son Lux has earned its reputation for splendor and sweep, but Out Into is something different: a punchy suite of tactile, detail-minded songs born from dazzling moments of collective improvisation. “We’re going places we’ve never gone before in terms of energy, attitude, color,” Lott says. “And it all comes from having reverence for those initial sparks, for treating the voice memo version of the idea as the most sacred iteration.”

These first-thought-best-thought strategies might come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed Son Lux’s recent adventures through Hollywood’s starrier corridors. Composing the Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022 and Marvel’s Thunderbolts* in 2025 has been painstaking work — and while it may have broadened the band’s panoramic vision beyond the margins of a cineplex screen, it also made Lott, Bhatia and Chang yearn to craft a Son Lux album that felt more immediate, more direct. And so Out Into finds Son Lux in a paradoxical zone between big and small, spontaneous and refined, experimentally-minded and pop-spirited. “We always want to walk that line of strangeness and familiarity in a way that’s exciting for the listener,” says Chang, “because it’s exciting for us.”

Recorded in bursts during downtime between film projects, Out Into was brisk work stretched out over a two-year span, the gestation periods between studio sessions allowing the group’s rhythms to sink deeper into the pocket while Lott’s lyrics became more saturated with meaning. “These songs are about losing and finding ourselves. How we lose ourselves in relationships, in work, in our children, in our pursuits and desires,” he says. So how do we find ourselves? How do we find each other?” 

These aren’t rhetorical questions, either. “When I say ‘find,’ I also mean ‘become’ and ‘change,’” Lott explains. “We’re continually changing as we learn who we are. That’s partly what Out Into means. We come out of something and into something else. Every moment is an exit and an entrance at the same time.”

Upon hearing these lyrics in the studio, Bhatia says he felt layers of reality beginning to overlap, as if Lott’s ideas about losing and finding were describing Son Lux’s music-making writ large. “There’s this way in which Ryan is imploring people to have deep human experiences and connections, and run toward those things,” Bhatia says. “And for us, creating is an example of that. His lyrics feel hand-in-glove with how these songs were made. There’s an intimacy to the way we’re consenting to the terms and conditions of modern life.”

It should be noted that modern life doesn’t feel like it used to. Before Out Into, Lott was rarely eager to explain his lyrics, but the stakes feel higher in today’s America. “There are more overtly political lyrics on this record,” he says, pointing in two directions without blinking. “‘You Could Be the One’ is about watching the ways in which people I know and love have lost themselves to a dystopic, Trumpist vision of life, which is akin to worship at the expense of everything else. ‘No God Like a King’ is a song about hypocrisy and White Nationalism.” (The former feels like a national fever dream with dub contours; the latter has a prickly groove that closes the album with a distinct fearlessness.)

Throughout, the intensity of Lott’s verses are flanked by Chang and Bhatia in rhythm section mode, with Bhatia playing bass guitar on a few tracks. “We're all fans of hip-hop — the boom-bap era in particular,” Chang says. “Stuff that has that gridded-but-not-gridded kind of feel. With our love for pioneers like J Dilla and Madlib, for liquidy beats, we’ve always been drawn to the humanity in it. And with AI changing the music industry so much, we’re interested in making stuff where you hear the hand.” 

In that sense, it’s easy to hear Out Into as Son Lux’s most hands-on album. If you listen for them, the fingerprints are everywhere, reinforcing the refrain Lott sings during “Out Into Us” in his trembled rasp: “You can slow down.” And you can. Take your time, feel things out. Out of something, into something else. The only way forward is change.