For a band with 24 Number # 1 Hits, there is something disarmingly human about US rockers, The Lumineers. Their music remains stubbornly intimate — preoccupied with the fragile interior lives of people trying, and often failing, to make sense of love, family, and loss. They never appear to make music unless it is something that pierces right through one’s heart. Their albums have touched on war, running away, great loves, alcoholism, addiction, grief, nostalgia, and modern-day melancholy.

From New Jersey to New Delhi

In India, as part of their Automatic World Tour, the band’s founding members, Wesley Schultz (lead vocals, guitar) and Jeremiah Fraites (drums, percussion, keyboards), are overwhelmed by the response from their Indian fans. “It’s been

mind-blowing to wrap our heads around playing in places so far away from where we grew up,” says Schultz shortly after stepping offstage. Fraites puts the distance into perspective: “From New Jersey to New Delhi.”

That sense of geographical and emotional distance — of leaving echoes through Automatic, the band’s latest album. Schultz says, “There’s a circle you come back to. You start in a very innocent place, you go all the way around, and then you return to where you began.” For both Schultz and Fraites, that return was artless.

The Raw Appeal

That instinct to let songs remain slightly rugged has long shaped The Lumineers’ work. It reached its most unflinching expression on 2019’s III, an album that confronted addiction and inherited trauma with uncommon clarity. When asked whether the album was about leaving home, Schultz says, “It was actually about my mother-in-law.” His wife’s mother passed away a few years ago, and the impact on her family was seismic. “A lot of people, especially in the US, don’t really talk about addiction. It becomes this hidden suffering.”

There is shame felt in being an addict and even loving one. “Whether you’re the addict or related to them, you carry it with you,” Schultz reflects. “It shapes how you understand yourself.” For his wife, growing up in the shadow of addiction, it created a lens which shadowed around her world — a feeling hard to put into words.

UNDERSTANDING OF GRIEF

That deep understanding of grief extends to Fraites as well. His brother’s death profoundly altered his family, a loss that continues to reverberate through the band’s music. “That kind of pain doesn’t stay isolated. It moves through everyone,” Schultz says. The band do not dramatise suffering or seek catharsis through volume. They sit with discomfort, allowing space for listeners to recognise themselves within it. Their music acknowledges that some wounds never fully close. They simply become part of the body’s memory. Ask Fraites about his favourite song, and the response comes without hesitation. “You’re All I Got.”

A simple response, but one that carries the weight of everything the band has built their work around: human connection as survival, love as a tether, music as a way of saying what often feels impossible to articulate.

AUTOMATIC CROWD-PULLERS

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