Look For Your Mind!

The Lemon Twigs — 2026

“Big hooks, strange detours, and harmonies everywhere, Look For Your Mind! is the Twigs at full strength.”

The Lemon Twigs have always sounded like they were beamed in from another era, but Look For Your Mind! feels like the moment Brian and Michael D’Addario finally stop apologizing for it. Six albums into their career, the Long Island brothers arrive at their most confident and focused record yet, a 14-song collection that wrings genuine emotion from Rickenbacker jangle and four-part harmony without ever feeling like a museum piece. Their two previous Captured Tracks releases, Everything Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know, sharpened their instincts considerably, but this one really benefits from their experience. What’s new is the presence of live drummer Reza Matin and bassist Danny Ayala alongside Tchotchke’s Eva Chambers, giving several tracks a physical looseness the brothers’ studio records previously lacked. The result is a full band feel that still sounds fully analog and completely unself-conscious, yet somehow more alive with every harmony and layered vocal.

Underneath all that chiming guitar pop is something darker. Brian has described the album as a response to a creeping sense of political and technological paranoia, and you can feel it pressing up against the sunny surfaces. There is a strange tension the deeper you dive into the lyrics but the trick the Twigs pull repeatedly is to make songs that feel instantly familiar and then quietly break the rules. A chorus arrives early. A bridge redirects the whole mood. A sing along moment is always just seconds away. Even with its retro vibe the album never feels trapped inside a nostalgia bubble, even when the influences are worn proudly on their sleeve. I think that is the balance The Lemon Twigs have always brought to a record but this time out they absolutely nail the structure and I think have made their most memorable record to date. Regardless of tempo these 14 tracks are easy to revisit and always have me reaching to increase the volume every so slightly every time I spin it.

“2 Or 3” is the kind of song that sounds like it has always existed, a bouncy, unshakeable piece of teenbeat pop where Brian reportedly dreamed the entire chorus in his sleep after a show in Buenos Aires. The melody earns that story. “I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You” is the album’s high point and, honestly, one of the best pure pop songs I have heard in years. The ringing guitar intro sets you up for something predictable, and then the bridge lands at the wrong time on purpose, the chorus gets cut short, and Eva Chambers’ harmonies lift the whole thing into something even better right up to the perfect ending of an up-tempo repeated harmonized chorus. It could have been the fictional Wonders’ big moment in That Thing You Do!, and I mean that as a genuine compliment to Adam Schlesinger’s ghost. “Bring You Down” channels early Beach Boys vocal stacking over a surf-rock riff that barely contains its own aggression, with lyrics about wage theft and AI displacement that sound completely at odds with how fun it is to listen to. The closing “Your True Enemy” is something else entirely: backward vocals, Leslie-run chorus takes, churning cellos, and a Yeats poem read by the brothers’ father run in reverse. It is the last memorable tweak in a record full of them.

Fans of Fountains of Wayne’s skills for perfect harmonies, Big Star’s bruised romanticism, and Raspberries-era Eric Carmen reaching for the back row will find plenty to turn up here, but the connections run deeper than the obvious touchstones. The Twigs share Sloan’s ability to cycle through classic influences and still sound unmistakably like themselves, and there is a loose, slightly scruffy warmth to the hookier moments that puts them in the same conversation as the Dwight Twilley Band, one of the great underrated artists of this exact strain of earnest guitar pop.

Look For Your Mind! does not ask you to catch up with it or defend it to anyone. It just plays, and it is very good, and that should be enough.