Los Angeles’ Storefront Church, the alias of Lukas Frank, announces his new album Ink & Oil due June 28th. The 12-tracks of Ink & Oil were produced, written, and performed by Lukas, recorded with a full live orchestra, and co-arranged by Travis Warner (David Campbell) and Lukas to capture the lush cinematic breadth of Ink & Oil. Alongside the album’s announcement, Storefront Church shares the new single “Coal,” further revealing the sonic cornucopia of the new album. Ink & Oil will also include the previously released single “The High Room,” which New Noise Magazine described as “epic in scope and gorgeous in its melody.”
To celebrate the album’s release, Storefront Church will be performing a hometown show in Los Angeles at The Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on June 28th with support from Maria BC. .
Ink & Oil was conceived quite insidiously after years of Lukas deciphering the familial lore of his great uncle Roger. After receiving a five year prison sentence for a desertion charge of the Army in 1993, Roger Frank mysteriously vanished from his cell, leaving nothing but an orange behind. Roger’s body was never found. When he was just 5 years old, Lukas began receiving visitations from his elusive uncle through vivid, recurring nightmares. Roger would come to Lukas in his room and try to speak with him, but Roger’s mouth wasn’t working; like it was glued shut. In his hands was a large orange, the skin peeled back, and written in the rind were words in black ink.
The subsequent years of his life spent between LA, with family on the East Coast and a solitary sabbatical in Connecticut, have been inexplicably haunted by sensory “manifestations” seemingly tied to his uncle’s presence. Images of a black rope hanging in the sky, a flock of black birds swarming inside the supermarket, and phone calls from unknown numbers asking him unnervingly prescient questions have all struck Lukas at various points. Stuck in limbo between walking nightmares and existential visions, Lukas’ perspective shifted with his return to Los Angeles while working on this body of work. Instead of feeling like the visions and dreams were intruders in the night, they became visitors – not always welcome or understood – but accepted as integral pieces of the narrative of Ink & Oil.
While all of the stories told in Ink & Oil speak to experiences 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 reform into something deeper; something that Lukas feels can be described simply as Faith.
Pre-order / save Ink & Oil and check out “Coal” above, learn more about Storefront Church, see upcoming live dates and full album details below. Stay tuned for more from Storefront Church coming very soon.