Album Review: The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1, Lord Huron

The Cosmic Selector Volume 1 Album Cover

The boys at Lord Huron have come back again with their fifth studio album The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. After a 4-year hiatus, the band, consisting of founder and lead singer Ben Schneider, drummer Mike Barry, bassist Miguel Briseño, and guitarist Tom Renaud, released the album on July 18th, 2025. This 12-track project provides listeners with an unexpected journey, with twists and turns through every song. Different themes are paired with contrasting sounds, sometimes even between back-to-back songs.

The album brings in Lord Huron’s nostalgic sounds, with many tracks having similar melodies to songs from previous projects, something that will be explored later. Best known for their hit “The Night we Met,” Lord Huron has built a reputation built upon cinematic, story driven, folk-rock, all which excels in the newest edition of their discography.

The lord Huron tour crew standing together after a show in Nashville.

The album excels in its purpose. Spontaneity. Inspiration comes from the idea of the lottery of life, and how any given event can change one’s course. This is seen many times throughout the project, with tracks such as “Is there Anybody Out There,” a melancholic and depressive tale of one who is lost in the cosmos, searching for any other sort of life, being immediately followed by “Who Laugh’s Last,” an extremely upbeat, dark, rock song with spoken narratives from actress Kristen Stewart. The story follows the narrator through a journey of discovery, breaking free, and testing who gets to “laugh last.” A complete switch-up of styles in two songs that follow one another on the album. Take that trend and apply it to the rest of the album, and the general concept of the project comes to life how Lord Huron envisioned.

As previously mentioned, Lord Huron brought in actress Kristen Stewart, known most famously for her role as Bella in the Twilight series, in the fifth track of the album, “Who Laughs Last,” as a spoken narrator. However, she was not the only feature on the project. KAZU, a dreampop artist with 15,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, is featured on the eighth track “Fire Eternal.” She is apart of the rock trio Blonde Redhead, a band with 500,000 monthly listeners. This is not the first time Lord Huron has brought a small artist onto one of their tracks. On their fourth studio album, Long Lost (2021), Huron invited artist Allison Ponthier to feature on the song “I Lied.” Ponthier had about 800,000 monthly listeners on Spotify at the time, however that number has grown to over 2 million.

Lord Huron performing at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Lord Huron does a great job fixating their music to certain themes and creating a story. Just by looking at many fan pages for the band, listeners can see that there are discussions containing characters created by the group to tell an entire story. As stated earlier, Lord Huron calls back many similar sounds and melodies compared to these previous albums as well. The cosmically haunting harmonica of eleventh track of the album, “Digging up the Past,” has an uncanny resemblance to Huron’s most popular song, “The Night we Met,” with ghostly chords invoking nostalgic emotions into the listener, providing an eerie feeling of sympathy to the narrator. The second track on the project, “Bag of Bones,” calls back to the gunslinging, western, desert fairytale of the band’s first studio album, Lonesome Dreams. “Who Laughs Last” is the most polarizing song on the album, giving way to a dark, upbeat, stomp-on-the-pedal feel. It’s fast, bombastic, and exciting, an oddball in a rather melancholic, nostalgic album. This specific track follows similar elements to those in the band’s third project Vide Noir, such as “Ancient Names (Part 1).”

Lord Huron perfectly encapsulates the meaning behind the album through all 12 tracks. With slow, nostalgic, folk songs to fast, racing rock songs, the projects spontaneity proves perfect with the lottery that is life. How we choose our paths, but the unintended consequences that could follow. The album was overall a massive success for the band, peaking at 23 on the Billboard 200, and number one on the Billboard Folk charts. Currently, the band is approaching their third and final leg of their 2025 tour, passing through Omaha, Nebraska on October 23rd, and Independence, Missouri on October 25th. Overall, the album has produced some of my favorite songs by the band to this day and gets me excited for when the band finally heads back to the studio to start writing up their next tale.