A conversation with Ben Schneider about identity, parallel life and the big life questions.
Ten years ago, Lord Huron published a song with “The Night WE Met” that changed her life. Almost three billion streams later, the song is one of the most successful indie folk tracks of the decade-and gave the band something that is more valuable than any chart success: artistic independence. On their new album The Cosmic Selector Vol.1 (VÖ: July 18, 2025), they used this freedom and created a plate that is probably the most personal in the band history.
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We met Ben Schneider, head and front man of Lord Huron, before her appearance on September 8th in the Tempodrom in Berlin. A conversation about identity, parallel life and the big questions of life.
These are Lord Huron
“Who was I when I started making music 15 years ago? How many me have I been since then?” This asks Ben Schneider, singer, songwriter and founder of the band Lord Huron. In 2010, the 40-year-old started the music project, which was originally intended as a solo career. The following year, however, he got his childhood friends – Mark Barry, Miguel Briseño and Tom Renaud – as new bandmates. In 2012 they released their first studio album Lonesome Dreams. Her sound has always been shaped by harmonica and western guitar riffs, which give the longing but hopeful texts the mystical atmosphere characterizing for Lord Huron.
The song that opened everything
The band made their breakthrough in 2015 with “The Night We Met”-not least through the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why”. Today the tragic, beautiful love song is considered a classic of the indie, and the band is one unmistakable actors of the folklore genre. While Schneider still appreciates the track very much, it now has a practical importance for him: “The song enabled us to create a basis, to achieve more people and continue to be able to do what we are today,” he says.
While other artists might try to chase after a success of this magnitude, Lord Huron “The Night WE Met” does not see as an obligation to end up a hit, but as a kind of free ticket for musical adventures.
To date, the song with its almost three billion clicks is one of the most played songs on Spotify – and only to put it in relation: Around eight billion people live in the world. So surprised that Ben Schneider is still surprised when fans outside the United States know who they are, let alone just sing along. “It is such a complicated business. The fact that we have been able to make music for such a long time is something for which I am very grateful. And when I see that fans on the other side of the world know our texts, it touches me very much,” explains the musician.
Since the appearance of her fifth studio album The Cosmic Selector Vol.1, the band has been on tour, currently they play their European shows before going back to the USA. “The concerts in Germany are always something special. I have the feeling that we are liked here,” Schneider confesses.
The Cosmic Selector Vol.1: From fiction to introspection
Nobody is as surprised by this fact as Ben Schneider himself. Critics: Inside, Lord Huron appreciate for their immersive storytelling and the way, like any tonecar, melody and every simple sound, deep in the narrative concept of their albums are deeply rooted. Each record opens its own universe, populated by figures such as Tubbs Tarbell – a fictional ghost and radio presenter, which shaped the Long Lost concept album in 2021.
With The Cosmic Selector Vol.1, however, you hit a slightly different direction. While Ben Schneider has so far sang from the perspectives of different characters, he comes to the fore on the new record. “I took a break for the first time in a long time to look at my life a bit. And I realized how far we actually got,” he explains.
By that he does not just mean the success of the band, but also the course of his private life. “I wondered how it could have been going. Not that I would regret something, but rather out of curiosity: What small decisions did I make that I had made here? Who would I have decided differently?” The thoughts and questions he asked himself, as he says, have landed quite directly on the album.
A jukebox, twelve parallel worlds
The cosmic jukebox represents the dramaturgical concept of The Cosmic Selector Vol.1 and leads the musician, and thus also its listeners: inside, through different parallel life. His gaze is shared: On the one hand, he looks back to the ghosts of the past, but at the same time his eyes are directed upwards, into the seemingly immeasurable nothing of the universe. Each of the twelve songs represents the consequence of a differently made decision. In the core, they are all connected by the pressing question, which is probably asked: R before: What if?
The Cosmic Selector Vol.1 acts like a spiritual march through the barren, limitless landscapes, under whose sky you have to lose yourself in order to find yourself. Or, to put it in Schneider’s words: “The album deals with the infinite space outside of ourselves, but also with the infinite space within our world. You could choose both forever.” On the album you can hear them, the longing for answers, which somehow seem to be in the past. “Ultimately, it is our only reference point when it comes to questions about the future,” explains the front man.
Schneider’s songwriting: Between poetics and philosophy
Against this background, you also notice the gentle change of mood that the new record brings: The Cosmic Selector Vol.1 sounds mystical, moody and somehow more serious than the previous ones, without losing their typically dreamy Western character. “Watch me go”, for example, deals with the moment when you make a decision that you know will be regretted later. The text is serious and worried, but Schneider’s deceptive -lively vocal melody makes you forget the uncomfortability behind it and enjoy the moment.
A stylistically opposite piece is “Who Laugh’s Last”. There, the songwriter combines the hectic pace of our world with a dystopian inner life that seems to have been surrounded by the sheer endlessness of the decision -making options. In the single, actress Kristen Stewart talks pictorial lines about cutting guitar riffs and driving bass lines, the mood becomes completely clear. For example, it says: “A frightening number of stars shone above me that expressed the cold indifference of the universe.” Senselessness and meaningfulness in a – a will of Schneider’s songwriting.
The mission
The Cosmic Selector Vol.1 researches the uncertainty of human existence and creates a 49 minute musical reference room in parallel worlds, full of hope and tragedy – like life itself. At the end of the album, the musician wraps his cosmic journey into “Life is Strange”: “Life is strange, and I am too. / I can’t change who I am and I don’t want it either”. He does not seem to have found any answers to his questions, but that’s probably not the point. The appeal seems to be: remain curious, not be intimidated by the sheer endlessness of possibilities.
Lord Huron can live out this mission thanks to “The Night WE MET” and offer their fans an encouraging, authentic soundtrack for the uncomfortable questions of life with their new album. Whether there will be a Vol.2 of the album is still in the stars, but Schneider said with a wink he wanted to “not exclude anything”.