THE LEMON TWIGS KEEP CHASING THE PERFECT POP SONG / TREES / 12.18.26
Brian and Michael D’Addario bring The Lemon Twigs back to Dallas with Look For Your Mind!, another impossibly detailed collection of harmonies, guitars and songs built with one foot in the history of pop music and the other somewhere much stranger.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
It has always been easy to talk about The Lemon Twigs in terms of other people’s records. Brian and Michael D’Addario know the language of late-’60s and ’70s pop with an almost unnerving fluency, the harmonies and chord changes and carefully placed guitar parts arriving with enough familiarity that you can spend an entire song trying to identify exactly which shelf in your record collection it belongs beside. But after six albums, that exercise has started to feel increasingly beside the point. The brothers have become less interesting for what they know about the past than for what they have learned to do with it, taking an enormous vocabulary of power pop, baroque arrangements, soft rock and guitar music and slowly turning it into something recognizably their own.
Their latest record, Look For Your Mind!, continues the run that began with Everything Harmony in 2023 and sharpened considerably on 2024’s A Dream Is All We Know, records Michael D’Addario has described as the point when they began making albums they would actually want to listen to themselves. The new record keeps the huge harmonies and guitar-driven writing at the center, but opens the studio doors a little wider, bringing touring members Reza Matin and Danny Ayala and Tchotchke’s Eva Chambers into a process the brothers had previously handled largely by themselves. The result still sounds unmistakably like The Lemon Twigs, but with a little more air moving through it and the sense of a band beginning to replace the meticulous isolation of two brothers building everything from the ground up.
That does not mean they have suddenly become straightforward. One of the pleasures of The Lemon Twigs has always been hearing a song appear to reveal itself completely before some unexpected chord, arrangement or melodic turn knocks it several inches sideways.
Brian has said that even when they try to write something completely direct, something strange inevitably finds its way inside, and Look For Your Mind! repeatedly uses that instinct to complicate music that might otherwise seem almost impossibly pristine. The title track arrives wrapped in jangling guitars and harmonies; “Fire And Gold” begins in power-pop territory before pulling itself apart; “Gather Round” reaches for the scale and optimism of late-’60s orchestral pop while carrying concerns that belong very firmly to 2026.
That combination is also why The Lemon Twigs make considerably more sense live than the perfection of the records might suggest. These are not museum pieces being carefully reconstructed under glass. Underneath the arrangements are songs built to survive being played by a band in a room, and the D’Addarios have spent enough of their lives performing that the technical precision never entirely gets in the way of the messier pleasure of watching people actually play together. Their current incarnation has increasingly brought the musicians heard on the records onto the stage as well, further collapsing the distance between the elaborate studio version of The Lemon Twigs and the considerably louder one standing in front of you.
They arrive at Trees on December 18 near the end of a U.S. run that also takes them through Richmond, Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans, Austin and Houston, closing out a year in which Look For Your Mind! has pushed the band deeper into the thing they seem increasingly obsessed with: the possibility that the great pop song is not an exhausted form at all, merely one that demands enough patience to keep looking for another way into it.
