California High Desert band's psychedelic, cinematic sound!

“I make music from the visuals in my head, they’re the soundtracks to movies that only exist in my mind,” says songwriter E Ray Béchard of This Lonesome Paradise. Now with their latest release Death Motels, those movies take form, sprawling across a three-part cinematic series that drags audiences into the gothic underbelly of the desert.

The cinematic series trilogy — E01: Let Us Prey, E02: Changelings, and E03: Shadow of the Blue Moon is a fever-dream narrative, playing like a séance committed to tape. As if the viewer were commanding a Ouija board, each chapter grows darker, pulling us deeper into a ritual that ends in sacrifice. By day, marauding motorcycle gangs stalk the desert highways, leaving dust and dread in their wake. By night, they shed their leather and chrome, transforming into cult figures under the glow of the moon. The protagonist, a vessel for the symbol of the outcast, the freak at the edge of society, leads us into this liminal world.

E02: Changelings

Here the world erupts into menace. Marauding motorcycle gangs prowl the desert highways by day; by night, they dissolve into ritual, their leather and chrome replaced by masks and firelight. Faces shift, allegiances fracture, and the protagonist is pulled deeper into the mystery of their own past. Ultraviolet cocktails glow with scorpion venom — otherworldly sacraments echoing the corrupted milk of A Clockwork Orange. The desert becomes both battleground and mirror, reflecting the protagonist’s fractured identity.

About This Lonesome Paradise:

Emerging from the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where they wrote and recorded their debut album Electric Dreams (American Standard Time), This Lonesome Paradise has since migrated to the arid high desert of Joshua Tree. Nested in their desert outpost, they recorded Nightshades with producers Taylor Kirk (Timber Timbre) and E. Ray Béchard—carrying with them a haunting sound and spirit that would evolve into Luna Nocturna, released last year on Bad Vibes Good Friends.

Their music conjures a world both cinematic and deeply human, where western noir collides with slinking lounge, and where trip-hop shadows and post-gothic moods drift through the dust. Featured regularly on KEXP’s Roadhouse Hour with Greg Vandy, who has twice named their records among his Top 10 Albums of the Year and were featured on Sounds of the New West Vol. 6 by Uncut Magazine. They’ve played festivals such as Treefort and Lightning in a Bottler and shared stages with acts such as WAND, Timber Timbre, The Warlocks, Spindrift and The Builders & The Butchers. Their song Blue for You was adapted into a narrative short film by Sebastián Ortiz Wilkins, currently on the festival circuit and nominated for awards at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, and Whistler Film Festival.

Led by vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter E. Ray Béchard, alongside Jordin Bordeaux (keys, vocals), Ivan Garcia (drums), and Chris Wilson (bass), the band crafts songs that feel suspended in time—equal parts fever dream, confession, and mirage. Their sound is both nostalgic and forward-facing: the ghost of a Morricone score haunted by Portishead’s rhythm section. It’s music that seems to drift from an old radio in a motel at the edge of nowhere.

Their forthcoming album, Death Motels, expands this mythology into a multi-part cinematic experience, a descent through the gothic underbelly of the desert that blurs the line between film, ritual, and dream. Conceived as a trilogy of short films and an album, Death Motels explores transformation and collapse in modern humanity, finding beauty in ruin. Each chapter unfolds like a séance: surreal, sensual, and spiritually charged. This uncanny visual language mirrors the band’s sonic aesthetic: elegant yet unsettling, romantic yet fractured, each frame capturing the same intimacy and disquiet that define This Lonesome Paradise’s sound.

Death Motels will be available on LP and download via Bad Vibes Good Friends on March 12th, 2026. Pre-orders are available HERE.

Stream / Buy / Download the album on Bandcamp

Artist: This Lonesome Paradise

Album: Death Motels

Label: Bad Vibes Good Friends

Release Date: March 12, 2026

Courtesy US/THEM group

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