How Will I Live Without A Body? was produced and recorded by Loma in England, Texas, and Germany, mixed by Dan Duszynski and mastered by Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound in New York. All songs were composed by the group—with a few nudges from a unique AI (see below).
 
How Will I Live Without a Body? is a gorgeous, unique, and oddly comforting album about partnership, loss, regeneration, and fighting the feeling that we’re all in this alone. Many of its songs have a feeling of restless motion; faceless characters drift through meetings and partings, tangling together and slipping away.

Throughout, the core of Loma’s sound remains intact: earthy, organic and deeply human, anchored by Cross’s cool, clear voice. Loma’s previous album, Don’t Shy Away, was galvanized by the encouragement of Brian Eno. This time, they were inspired by another hero, Laurie Anderson, who offered a chance to work with an AI trained on her work. Meiburg sent two photos; Anderson’s AI responded with two haunting poems. “We used fragments of these poems in ‘How It Starts’ and ‘Affinity’,” he says. “And then Dan noticed that one of AI-Laurie’s lines, ‘How will I live without a body?’ would be a perfect name for the album, since we’d nearly lost sight of each other in the recording process.” [See longer bio below].
 
As for How Will I Live Without A Body?’s cover art, returning collaborator Lisa Cline took inspiration from the histories of “bog people,” human cadavers found naturally mummified in peat bogs. (From Wikipedia: “These “bodies” are both geographically and chronologically widespread, having been dated to between 8000 BCE and the Second World War.”).
 
How Will I Live Without A Body? is available to preorder on CD/LP/digitally worldwide from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com, and select independent stores in North America will receive the Loser edition on Transparent Smoke Vinyl. In the UK and Europe, LP preorders through Sub Pop’s new Mega Mart 2, and UK/EU Independent retailers will receive the Loser edition on Neon Orange Vinyl (All whilst stock lasts!)
 

January 2023, Dorset, UK. Snow is piled at the door, icy roads are closed, and Emily Cross is in a coffin—not a promising setting for a rebirth. But for Loma, this is where they bring their band back from the brink.
 
“It’s like a demon enters the room whenever we get together,” writer, singer, and instrumentalist Cross says of the struggle to bring new Loma music into the world. Following the release of their 2020 second album, Don’t Shy Away, Loma’s three members were cast around the globe, and the band—not for the first time—entered a deep sleep.
 
Multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer Dan Duszynski remained in his studio in central Texas, but Cross, a UK citizen, moved to Dorset, and writer and instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg left the US for Germany to research a book. In the pandemic years, being in the same room was impossible, and attempts to start a new record faltered.
 
“We got lost,” admits Meiburg, “and stayed that way.” The trio’s personal lives diverged, and remote sessions didn’t gel; a post-pandemic reunion in Texas was cut to a few days by an illness, and a pile of half-finished tracks was an unruly mess. The following winter, in an attempt to salvage the record and the band, Cross suggested they regroup in the UK, in the tiny stone house—once a coffin-maker’s workshop—where she works as an end-of-life doula. With minimal recording gear and few instruments, Loma turned two whitewashed rooms into a makeshift studio, using a coffin woven from willow branches as a vocal booth.
 
It was a turning point. “There was a sense of, well, this is it,” Meiburg recalls. “And when the ice storm swept in I thought: here we go again, even the elements are against us. But sitting in our heavy coats around a little electric radiator, we realized how much we’d missed each other—and that just being together was precious.” 
 
They scrapped much of what they’d made, and let a new place set a new course. The first two Loma albums featured the sounds of Texan animals and landscapes; this time, the one-lane roads, hedgerows and dark skies of Dorset gave the new songs an ineffable but unmistakable Englishness. The band used the ruin of a 12th-century chapel as a reverb chamber—surprising hillwalkers who peeked in to find them singing to no one—and the sounds of Cross’s chilly workshop wormed their way into the recording: a leaky pipe, a drummer’s brushes on a metal lampshade, voices left on an ancient answering machine.
 
What emerged was How Will I Live Without A Body?: a gorgeous, unique, and oddly comforting album about partnership, loss, regeneration, and fighting the feeling that we’re all in this alone. Many of its songs have a feeling of restless motion; faceless characters drift through meetings and partings, tangling together and slipping away. “I Swallowed A Stone” is like a nightmare with a happy ending; “How It Starts” and “Broken Doorbell” reflect on the challenge (and necessity) of wrestling with agoraphobia.  Though the record nods to the trio’s separate lives— a German percussion ensemble, a pair of Texan owls, and the surf at Chesil Beach make guest appearances—the core of Loma’s sound remains intact: earthy, organic and deeply human, anchored by Cross’s cool, clear voice.
 
Most artists want their records to be listened to as a whole. But with Loma it’s particularly rewarding, and How Will I Live Without A Body? reveals itself more with every listen. Songs that begin as riddles swim into focus when listened to in sequence; images return and interact in unexpected ways, and something like a narrative begins to form. It’s also a record of two distinct halves: A compelling sense of wandering engulfs the A-side, as the trudging progress of opener ‘Please, Come In’ staggers and sways through succeeding tracks to the album’s centerpiece, ‘How It Starts’—which gathers strength and purpose, flooding the B-side with a hope that embraces darkness without surrendering to it.
 
Loma’s previous album, Don’t Shy Away, was galvanised by the unexpected encouragement (and eventual contributions) of Brian Eno. This time, they were inspired by another hero, Laurie Anderson, who offered a chance to work with an AI trained on her entire body of work. Meiburg sent a photo from his book-in-progress about the once and future life of Antarctica; Anderson’s AI responded with two haunting poems. “We used parts of them in a few songs,” he says. “And then Dan noticed that one of its lines, ‘How will I live without a body?’ would be a perfect name for the album, since we nearly lost sight of each other in the recording process.” Anderson, Meiburg adds, was happy for the band to use the title. “I think she was tickled that her AI doppelganger is running around naming other people’s records.”
 
But in the end, Loma’s efforts to reconnect with one another are the album’s central focus: What do you owe a shared past, when everyone and everything has changed? “Making this record tested us all,” says Duszynski. “I think that feeling was alchemized through the music.” Alchemized, because How Will I Live Without A Body? is by no means a stressed-out record: an undercurrent of deep calm runs through it. “Somehow, out of the chaos, we made something that sounds very relaxed,” Cross notes, mystified. But maybe ‘relaxed’ isn’t the right word. It’s more like a feeling of relief, of making it through a tough journey together. “I’ve never run a marathon,” Cross says. “But I can imagine it’s kind of what that feels like.” This is how it starts, to move again.