It’s fitting that The Lumineers would release a new album on Valentine’s Day 2025. The longtime roots-pop favourites have no shortage of heartstring-tugging love and heartbreak songs in their catalogue, adding more with this fifth studio album and follow-up to 2022’s Brightside. As they did with that record, The Lumineers tapped David Baron and Simone Felice to co-produce Automatic, with the band notching their first co-production credit while recording the album at Woodstock, New York’s Utopia Studios over the course of a month. Where earlier Lumineers records focused more squarely on relationships and heartbreak, Automatic zooms out to take stock of the collateral damage wrought by the ills of the day, like persistent anxiety on the deceptively warm and loping “Ativan” and the “black sedan of depression” referenced on the urgent and bracing opening track, “Same Old Song”. “Better Day” feels like a plainly rendered thesis statement, as singer/guitarist Wesley Schultz offers a laundry list of modern problems, like “senators [making] insider trades” and protests marred by “rubber bullets, pepper spray”. Other highlights on the album include “Plasticine”, on which Schultz subtly channels a grungier side of his vocal while lamenting artistic phoniness, and the aching “Keys on the Table”, which grapples with a loss of faith in oneself. And as for that canon of songs of love and love lost, “Asshole” is a lovely if biting addition, as Schultz squares up against his own foibles while acknowledging we all have our own dark shadows.