With a lineup of My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero, Coheed & Cambria’s Travis Stever, Circa Survive’s Anthony Green and Thursday’s Tim Payne and Tucker Rule, L.S. Dunes is perhaps one of the most exciting supergroups to coalesce in recent memory.
The five-piece formed in 2020, shortly before the onset of the Covid pandemic. “It started for me with a call from Tucker,” says Iero. “Tucker and Tim asked me to be involved. They wanted to do a project because we were supposed to be on tour, but we were stuck at home instead.
“There’s a mutual friendship with Travis from Coheed And Cambria. We got on a group chat, sent a couple of riffs – and some funny memes – back and forth, and it just grew from there.”
Two years later, the group have released their debut album, Past Lives, which hosts a clutch of stellar punk-flavored post-hardcore anthems – not at all surprising given the caliber of the musical brains behind it.
Highlights include Like Forever, which finds Iero and Stever trading lead guitar hooks and distortion-heavy powerchords; the softer, disarming closer, Sleep Cult; and its opener, 2022, a theatrical track originally written on acoustic guitar by Anthony Green, but repurposed for electric guitars for this new project.
The latter introduces the world to the L.S. Dunes in some style, with Anthony Green’s earworm vocals sitting atop an energetic weave of gain-laden powerchords, with intricately worked leads peppered throughout.
And now, in this new video filmed for Guitar World, Iero and Stever offer not only a playthrough of the track, but also a comprehensive lesson so you can have a go at learning it yourself.
Gear-wise, Iero plays an Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay through a Mesa Rectifier Bandlander combo, and Stever a 1995 American Fender Stratocaster through a Mesa Fillmore 25 combo, but any six-string will work so long as you’re running it through a suitably gain-laden guitar amp.
“The demo [for 2022] was so beautiful and so heavy, and Anthony really wanted us to tackle this as a unit,” says Iero. “Tucker, I think, was the first one to jump on it, and it was very obvious from there where we wanted to take it. I took his drum beats and immediately created something for the chorus. It really took form from there and ended up being the lead track for the album.”
“2022 in particular is a bit different from the rest [of the tracks] as the demo track
already had some beautiful instrumentation on it,” adds Stever. “Anthony wanted to have us jump in and recreate riffs that would best compliment his vocals and we definitely did that.
“There is one part on the track that we all agreed that we wanted to keep from the original demo, that comes in and out of the track if you listen closely. It’s just some simple plucking, but we all felt it had a place in the final, L.S. Dunes version.”
