Lost Under Heaven

Lost Under Heaven, also known as LUH, embodies the artistic and sonic partnership of Ellery James Roberts, onetime WU LYF frontman, and Dutch multidisciplinary creator Ebony Hoorn. The pair surfaced in 2016 with their first album, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing, which carried their signature edgy, atmospheric post-punk approach.

The project took shape in 2013 after Roberts disbanded his prior band WU LYF. He met Hoorn, then an emerging photographer and filmmaker born in the Netherlands, at a house party in Manchester, England, in 2012. Their creative and personal connection prompted joint songwriting; they journeyed to Thailand, where Hoorn devised the group’s name, before settling in a repurposed hospital in Amsterdam. There they tracked their debut single, “Unites,” issued in 2014—a luminous indie-rock cut pairing Roberts’s raw shouts with Hoorn’s measured, distant vocals. Mute Records promptly signed them, and the duo completed their first album on secluded Osea Island off England’s southeast coast.

Bobby Krlic, performing as the Haxan Cloak, produced Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing, released in 2016; his brooding textures framed the couple’s fervent compositions. Late that year they offered a BitTorrent preview containing artwork, their artistic declaration, and two tracks: the ’90s alternative-flavored “Lost Under Heaven” plus the non-album cut “Angels Sing.” The twelve-song album unfolded as a cyclical sequence tracing what Roberts termed impulse, experience, and enlightenment, its stark-yet-tender vocal exchanges building toward expansive, richly layered passages on cuts such as “Beneath the Concrete” and “$ORO.” LUH supported the release with a worldwide tour featuring Steven Hermitt on drums and Oliver Cooper handling machines.

They later returned to Manchester, where Hoorn adopted bass duties and expanded her visual-art practice. In 2019 the duo delivered their second album, Love Hates What You Become. Cut in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton and Swans drummer Thor Harris, the record revealed a harder, more anthemic direction shaped by ’80s punk forebears Patti Smith and Nick Cave. Its singles comprised “For the Wild,” “Post-Millennial Tension,” and “Bunny’s Blues.”