Lukas Frank is the songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist behind Storefront Church. Its members include a large rotating cast similar in makeup to Broken Social Scene or Black Country New Road. Contributions have ranged from Laetita Sadier, Phoebe Bridgers, Zachary Cole Smith (DIIV), George Clarke (Deafheaven), Circuit Des Yeux, Lauren Auder, Cassidy Turbin (Beck), Sam Wilkes, and a dozen more.
Storefront Church contributed their song “The Gift” to the Netflix Series The Queen’s Gambit, as well as performed opening slots for Weyes Blood, Madison Cunningham, DIIV, Deafheaven. In the new year, they’re releasing a single featuring Laetitia Sadier with a tour to follow. Storefront Church has demonstrated an unheard of versatility in their ability to open for soft rock balladeer Weyes Blood as well as for the seminal metal act Deafheaven.
The new album, five years in the making, conceived in the pandemic during forced isolation and rolling fires in Los Angeles, finds Lukas looking for a connection out of complete isolation. “My cynical, atheistic worldview was killing me, I was looking for a way into some kind of faith, and my own imagination seemed like it could be a way in.”
The album Ink & Oil maintains the lush cinematic vision of Los Angeles as his first release, but dials it up to 12 with a full live orchestra on every song, drawing connections to artists like Scott Walker, Brian Wilson, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Ennio Moricone. Ink & Oil is a record about family history, as much as it is a reckoning with mental health and spirituality. Broken narratives about ghosts of relatives pass through the record like forlorn faces pressed to car windows as they pass by. “I know a lot of the lyrics are cryptic and even a bit hifalutin, but I had to allow myself to sometimes not know exactly what I was writing about and let the meaning come later. There were mysteries for me about these songs that weren’t solved until way after recording, and sometimes not at all. Ultimately, somehow, I arrived at something that felt genuine, something still deeply personal that I came to through these songs.”
There are many stories that accompany Ink & Oil. While all of these stories speak to something from Lukas’s past, there is genuine mystery as to what’s factually real and what’s emotionally real. Lukas finds his inspiration in the tension between the two; the gray area where memory and belief overtake accepted truth and certainty to then reform into something deeper; something that Lukas feels can be described simply as Faith.
We take what we know and we add to that what we believe and we arrive somewhere new, sometimes somewhere fantastic or surreal, and sometimes somewhere profound. All the while trusting that music borne from inspiration, be it divine or mundane, will open the door.