Lightning Bug–the project of musicians and friends Audrey Kang, Kevin Copeland, Logan Miley, Dane Hagen and Vincent Puleo–announces the band’s third album, A Color of the Sky. A Color of the Sky is an album of many firsts: the band’s first album with their new label home, Fat Possum, the band’s first time recording together as a live band, and the first time Lightning Bug, initially a three-piece, is rounded out by Hagen and Puleo as full-time band members. Recorded in a rundown home-turned makeshift studio in the Catskills, A Color of the Sky finds Lightning Bug sounding more organic, dynamic and lush than ever, while also finding the band’s songwriter Audrey Kang sounding bolder than before. Pre-order A Color of the Sky,out June 25th on Fat Possum HERE. 

To celebrate the album announcement, Lightning Bug also shares the first single off of the forthcoming record. Lead single “The Right Thing Is Hard To Do” brings together a dreamy country motif with Lightning Bug’s boundless guitar pop to transportive effect. As Kang examines her struggles with vulnerability and self-worth, connecting those personal issues with global ones, the music sways and glimmers like water in moonlight. Growth and self-acceptance have rarely sounded so otherworldly—yet so intimate—as they do across A Color of the Sky, and this first single is a prime example of that.

Audrey Kang on “The Right Thing Is Hard To Do”: “Here I wanted to connect how the struggles and flaws within the individual are mirrored in the greater problems of society. How do we as individuals know we are on the right path? How do we as a society, as a species, know we are on the right path? So I started with myself, and my own struggles, touching on how I hide myself away from other people, on my stage fright, on my inability to be vulnerable, on this feeling I used to have that I needed to prove I was worthy of being alive. Then I tried to connect these struggles outward to global issues like xenophobia, arbitrary borders, the lines we draw between ourselves and the environment, and the ways we sacrifice the health of the planet for human convenience.”

Lightning Bug recording together as a live band helped make A Color of the Sky feel more organic, dynamic, and full than their previous albums. It also enhanced Audrey’s newfound sense of clarity and confidence in her songwriting. “Songs in the past sometimes felt muddled, or I felt lost where to take them,” she elaborates. “But for this one, each song felt like a whole entity from conception.” The change is undeniable. Her voice is more pronounced than ever, the arrangements streamlined, the messages more palpable—all in service of an immersive emotional resonance. “I want listeners to explore their own interior worlds,” she concludes. “It’s about learning to trust yourself, about being deeply honest with yourself, and about how self-acceptance yields a selfless form of love.”

Photo Credit: Ingmar Chen