Soft

Album ∙ Pop ∙ 2025

LANY

LANY’s sixth album finds the Nashville-hailing pop-rock aesthetes settling well into their post-honeymoon phase as a duo (drummer Les Priest departed the band before the release of 2023’s A Beautiful Blur) while exploring new facets of their sumptuous and straightforwardly romantic sound. There’s still plenty here that will be recognizable to longtime listeners—the warm, Blue Nile-recalling saxophone line on the opening title track, the seductive and soft-lit pomp of “Know You Naked”—but with the aid of HAIM and The 1975 collaborator Tommy King on production duties, Paul Klein and Jake Goss are clearly taking pleasure in coloring outside their defined lines on Soft. The ascending-chord synth-pop of “Make Me Forget” is a dead ringer for CHVRCHES’ own neon dreams, while the lushness of ’90s R&B is evoked on “Good Parts” and the glistening keys on closing track “Last Forever.” “Am I too old to act my age?” Klein ruminates on the reflective “Act My Age,” but Soft is proof that LANY continues to mature gracefully in the pop landscape.