The first thing you’ll hear when you press play is a single breath. It’s the harbinger of a quiet, but remarkable moment between the listener and vocalist Anthony Green, a moment that conjures a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and the incoming relief of a clean slate. It’s also a template of sorts for Violet, the deeply considered second full-length album from L.S. Dunes—a collection that is nothing if not a celebration of life’s everyday enchantments. That song is called “Like Magick” for a reason.

“What I love about that song as a whole is that when you’re listening to it and everything starts to get introduced, you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” says guitarist Frank Iero, who along with fellow guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Tim Payne, and drummer Tucker Rule, make up the rest of L.S. Dunes. “You may think you know what’s going to happen because you’ve heard our first album or because you have some preconceived notions of our other bands. But when the song kicks in, I think you really get the sense that anything goes on this record. We could go anywhere from that point.”

For Green, opening the album with a full-hearted acapella goes even further in setting the tone: “It was more like, I’m being as vulnerable as I possibly can be at this moment and I’ve never been more vulnerable ever.”

The earliest version of L.S. Dunes—the one that introduced themselves to the world at Chicago’s Riot Fest in 2022 and went on to release their blissfully chaotic debut, Past Lives, later that year—was birthed in turbulence. There was a pandemic. There were time and family constraints. There were members away on tour with one of their many other bands: Iero’s My Chemical Romance, Green’s Saosin and Circa Survive, Stever’s Coheed and Cambria, and Payne and Rule’s Thursday, among them. Somehow, they managed to make it work, releasing a few more singles along the way, and touring the globe for a growing and passionate cult-like fanbase. By and large, it was a successful first effort. But there were also some unforeseen consequences, and as the album cycle came to an end, there was at least one mistake that Green knew they needed to correct.

“I became so sick of playing the song where I sing, ‘Sorry that I wish that I was dead,’ and I am so sorry I even wrote that song,” he says of “Sleep Cult,” the closing track on their debut. “I’m grateful that people resonate with it, but it just wasn’t helpful for me to sing that every night or to talk about that. So this time, I personally decided that I really wanted to make a record that says there is magic in the world. I wanted to celebrate music and the transformative power that it has to connect and inspire people. I wanted to make something that was in complete opposition to that song—something that says, I want to live.”

“I would imagine that when you have a song like that, you could be living in the problem,” adds Rule. “So maybe this record is more about living in the solution.”

By any measure, Violet—once again helmed by Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip—lives up to that promise, and in many ways, it opens up an opportunity to rediscover L.S. Dunes in a different light. Where Past Lives takes its oxygen from the thrill of frenzy and impulsiveness, Violet breathes deeper with a more open and expansive palette. Whether it lives in the confident and steady pulse of a song like “Machines,” in the rousing lyrical empowerment of “Paper Tigers,” or in the way that “Forgiveness” forges itself as an anthem for love and unconditional acceptance in the face of our personal failures, this is a body of work that secures multiple outcomes: There is hindsight. There is hope. There is, in fact, magic.

Perhaps no greater evidence of this exists but in the album’s name. Violet. A word that entered Iero’s subconscious while mumbling scratch lyrics to a new song he was writing, a word that became the working title for that song, and a word that survived demo after demo until it finally became the name of the album—despite not appearing anywhere in the final lyrics of the title track. “It just happened,” Iero insists. It appeared out of nowhere.

“I think that in doing this for as long as I’ve done this, it constantly happens where you come up with an idea and then figure out where and how it could fit,” he explains. “That was part of this process. It’s not always going to be like, ‘Here’s the meaning,’ and then I find the word. Sometimes it goes the opposite way. Sometimes you find the word and then you find the meaning after.”

That’s the thing about magic: You need to suspend disbelief. You need to surrender to it. You need to stop asking for an explanation and simply embrace it when it comes. As L.S. Dunes embark on this latest phase of their forward travel, Green, for one, is taking that approach to heart. Having originally been unsure of the suggested album title, he came to recognize its mystical subconscious origins as a feature, not a bug. It was a realization that ultimately gave Violet, the album, a meaning that goes well beyond the word itself. Violet is a way of being.

“Honestly, Violet could be whatever you wanted it to be and that’s OK, because letting it just betaught me that I don’t need to have my needs served in everything. It showed me that when you stop trying to control everything and you let things be as they are, that’s where the fucking magic happens,” he laughs, finding himself at full circle. “As it turns out, that was actually the whole thing I wanted this album to convey in the first place.”