By: Josh Kitchen / October 22, 2024
Lukas Frank - by Silken Weinberg (all photographs of Lukas Frank by Silken Weinberg)
Storefront Church, the moniker of Los Angeles musician and artist Lukas Frank, released his outstanding second studio album, Ink & Oil in June. From the first notes of the opening track, "The High Room," the listener is immediately transported into what feels like a 19th century cityscape dotted with people who float between industrial coal filled smokestacks and the tranquility of a life spent among orange groves. It's an operatic push and pull examining human coexistence with the natural world, weighed against the looming reminder that neither we nor the Earth are here for long.
When I first listened to Ink & Oil, I recommended it to a friend by liking it to a combination of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and American Prometheus, the Robert Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin that inspired Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It helps that there’s a track titled "The Manhattan Project," (written before the film!) Familiar themes and musical influence can be found on Ink & Oil, but what makes it stand out is the sincerity in Frank's singing and the superb honesty and openness in his writing, letting you into his head and following him on a record that deserves to be listened to with attention and care.
I spoke with Frank about Ink & Oil and discussed the record's influences from medieval mysticism, Brian Wilson, Ennio Morricone, and the time he got out his car and got on top if it in stopped traffic on the 110 freeway.
Congrats on the release of Ink & Oil this year. It’s an album that kind of hits you immediately and doesn’t let go. I wanted to ask you about releasing it this year—the build-up and how it feels to finally get it out.
It was a really long process making this album. It was about three years of preparation, followed by a summer of tracking and mixing, and then some more time went by, and we remixed it again. By the time it finally came out, it was five years later from start to finish. I’d been carrying these songs with me since I released my first album, As We Pass in 2021. It's been really cathartic and gratifying to finally have this music out there.
When you listen to it, you can tell these tracks have been meticulously worked on, and on a thematic level, it feels like you’re building something. When I listen to it I hear themes of industrialization versus the natural world and that kind of push and pull between the two. This feels quite literal in a song like “Coal.”
I think that’s exactly how I feel about the album. There’s this... to use a big annoying word, dichotomy. In “Coal,” I was really trying to express the emotional whiplash of the post-modern experience. The feeling where you’re looking at photos of your family right next to photos of atrocities, and you’re just desensitized. I tried, in a really melodramatic way, to make a song that captured the manic feeling of that. And I was feeling pretty manic at the time, so that’s what came out.
I was listening to the track "The Manhattan Project," and I couldn’t help but think of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Ludwig Göransson’s score for the film. Was that intentional?
I actually finished "The Manhattan Project" before Oppenheimer came out, so it wasn’t inspired by the movie. But it’s funny you mention that because the song has a lot of cinematic influences. I was more inspired by people like Ennio Morricone and Johnny Greenwood. I wanted to make a song that felt like a bomb test. The song was done a couple of years before Oppenheimer, but I do love the score—it’s incredible. Göransson did an amazing job with the music, and I love that the movie is 90% score. But for Ink & Oil, I was drawing more from Morricone, Jonny Greenwood, and Scott Walker’s film scores, especially Childhood of a Leader. I’ve always made cinematic music, and with this record, I wanted to push that even further and make something that felt like a visual experience.
Speaking of Jonny Greenwood, his score for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood comes to mind, as well as Paul Schrader's First Reformed. Those films, with their environmental themes and tension, have scores that feel like spiritual companions to the songs on Ink & Oil. This music feels like a scream to the world. Does that resonate with you?
I think that makes sense. When I was making As We Pass, the songs were more about things ending and passing away, reflecting on things falling apart. But Ink & Oil is more about acceptance, even if it’s a kind of delusional acceptance. The narrator on this record is processing things in real time and having a hard time doing it. So there’s that delusional element to it—trying to make sense of everything when it’s all so overwhelming.
A lot of records that have come out post pandemic have a feeling—not necessarily of hopelessness, but of survival in the face of loss. I think of Weyes Blood’s And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, as an example. Were there any contemporary artists that were on your mind while making Ink & Oil?
I love Natalie [Mering] (Weyes Blood) and her music, but for Ink & Oil, I was mostly thinking about older artists—people like Brian Wilson, Scott Walker, and Neil Young. They were the main references for this album. There are definitely contemporary artists I love, and I’m sure they influenced me in some way, but consciously, I was drawing from older music.
I definitely hear a lot of Brian Wilson, especially in the vocal arrangements. Can you talk a bit more about his influence on you?
Oh yeah, Brian Wilson is huge for me. "Surf’s Up" might be my favorite song of all time. It’s one of those songs that just does everything I’m trying to do with my own music. It’s so visual—like a perfectly built watch. It’s intricate and sophisticated, but it still manages to hit you on an emotional level.
Left: Brian Wilson, photographed by Ithaka Darin Pappas
Every time I listen to it, I tear up. There’s a depth to the way he structures his songs. He builds these layered, complex arrangements, but underneath all of that, there’s something deeply human. That balance between technical brilliance and raw emotion is something I really tried to capture on Ink & Oil.
I think Brian Wilson, more than most artists, understood the power of making music that feels like it’s reaching for something beyond just a song. He was always pushing boundaries—trying to make records that were not only sonically advanced but emotionally transcendent. Surf’s Up is a perfect example of that. It’s not just a song, it’s almost like a piece of theater. That theatrical, almost otherworldly quality to his songwriting was something I was definitely aiming for with this record.
And then you have Van Dyke Parks, who wrote with Brian during that period, and he brought this whole other dimension to the music. Van Dyke Parks added this layer of complexity and strangeness, especially in the Smile sessions. He wasn’t afraid to get weird with the lyrics or the arrangements, and I think that tension between Brian’s melodic genius and Van Dyke’s more eccentric, intellectual approach created something magical. Surf’s Up feels like this collision of their two worlds—Brian’s natural, almost naive sense of wonder, and Van Dyke’s more cynical, intellectual take on things.
Illustration from The Augsberg Book of Miracles, 16th Century
Ink & Oil is such a visual album. It feels like it could be paired with a landscape painting or Ansel Adams' photography.
Definitely. With this album, I was really trying to create a visual experience. Oftentimes, I had a kind of a visual north star. One of those was The Augsberg Book of Miracles, which is a collection of paranormal happenings from medieval times. It’s full of paintings and descriptions of these surreal events, like raining blood, or a woman who’s half human, half goat. There are three comets in the sky, and they’re supposed to signify the coming of some big event. The illustrations of these things are really stunning.
That helped me get into the headspace of a time when things were less clear-cut, when people were uncertain of what was real and what wasn’t. There’s a book I read called A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgård. He’s famous for his My Struggle series, but this is more like theological fiction. It reinterprets stories from the Bible, like Noah’s Ark, but from the perspective of Noah’s extended family as they’re consumed by the flood.
Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake and Mount McKinley (which is now named Denali)
There’s a quote in The Book of Miracles. It talks about how the scientific method is based on the repeatable, and because of that, things that only happen once are dismissed as unverified. So, miracles are essentially swept away. That kind of thinking—this openness to the surreal—was really important to me. Wherever I could find that feeling, I latched onto it, whether it was in books, movies, or photography.
I found that in all kinds of places—like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where there’s this sense of divinity, faith, and this “otherness” in the world. That’s something I was really trying to tap into, as a sort of faith of my own. In the face of everything happening in the world, whether it’s delusion or faith—maybe delusion is the first step to faith, I don’t know—but all of that thinking was really important to me at the time. Maybe it was a coping strategy or something, but it was definitely part of my mindset while making this album.
Continuing the theme of the visual aspect, the music video for "Coal" is pretty incredible and found you getting out of your car, and then onto your car in stopped traffic on the 110 freeway.
Oh man, that was a wild shoot. We had a tiny budget—around $500—and I worked with a small crew of friends. We didn’t have permits, so we were shooting on the 110, which was definitely risky and kind of ill-advised. But we just went for it. I worked with these Russian filmmakers who barely spoke any English, but they were incredibly talented. We strapped this Snorricam rig to my chest to get these intense close-up shots of me walking down the freeway. The whole idea was to capture this manic, chaotic energy, like being lost in an industrial wasteland. We only had a few takes because we were running out of daylight, and the pressure was on.
There was one moment where I climbed on top of my car in the middle of traffic, and that ended up being the shot on the back of the album cover. It wasn’t planned at all—we were just trying to get something raw and spontaneous. It was definitely not safe, but there’s something about cars and traffic that I’ve always been drawn to. I spend a lot of time in my car, so it felt right for the song. We had to make a lot of quick decisions, and not everything went as planned, but in the end, it all worked out. It’s funny how sometimes the most chaotic moments can lead to the best results.
Do you have any guiding philosophies as an artist, a mantra?
I don’t think I have a specific mantra, but I just try to keep moving forward. I think the key is persistence—just keep plugging away at things.
Storefront Church will be opening for Emma Ruth Rundle at the Zebulon in December.
Follow Storefront Church here and listen to Ink & Oil below:
All photos by Silken Weinberg
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