LuxJury, led by Nicole ‘Lux’ Fermie, release ‘Giving Up,’ an album exploring queer love and identity through deeply personal storytelling that came after she quit her previous band, came out as queer, and took a break from music for years. Nicole explains, “I had lived the life of a musician on the breadline. I was dating the drummer in the band. We broke up. I realized I was queer, fell in love with a woman, and took a break from music for years because I felt like everything I’d written thus far had been completely disingenuous, because I had this whole other side of my life that I hadn’t lived. I came back to music with something to say.” The album opens with “Poly-Amerie,” set against sweeping strings and forceful, dynamic guitars, telling the story of a love triangle where three women try to be romantically open while keeping jealousy at bay, with Nicole saying, “The song is about the differences in the ways that men and women navigate relationships. In WLW relationships, it can sometimes feel like we never break up—there’s this sort of weird, deep bond that women create with each other, where even if they’ve come to hate each other it’s still this long and drawn-out separation.”
The record’s first single “Hot Mess” delivers a liltingly groovy slice of yacht-rock-adjacent indie about reliving passionate teenage years as a result of rediscovering sexuality as an adult, with Nicole explaining, “You completely compromise on any sort of self-care and are willing to be a complete doormat for the sake of that first queer love you experience later in life, where you’re like, ‘I’m going for this with everything I’ve got.'” The introspective “I Could Love You” finds Nicole candidly sharing, “It was the first time that I ever embodied a side of myself that was not very good, that I wasn’t proud of. I always talk about how women are caring, but ‘I Could Love You’ is about how women can be cruel—I had fallen out of love and didn’t know how to get out of it and was getting really embittered and resentful of the person who was making me feel responsible for them.” Nicole says, “Honestly, most of this album is me getting over my first queer relationship. There’s no lie about it. I feel like a teenager: it should be an angsty album, but it came out the way it did, hopefully, because I’m a bit older.” The album explores how queer people navigate relationships and breakups in ways not covered in mainstream media, with Nicole noting, “The underlying current on this album is definitely what it’s like to have relationships with an undertone of social precarity. The biggest undercurrent on this album is that letting go of societal pressure.”