Lucca Dohr’s “Winter’s Coming” Takes Broken Hearts Beachside

It’s not difficult to tell that Lucca Dohr comes from Los Angeles. “Winter’s Coming”, his first single since 2020’s Norwich EP, is tanned bedroom pop, set to a breezy tempo made just for PCH coasting. The drums pedal along like bikes on the sidewalk with afternoon-glint synth twinkles, the guitar strums are sun-streaked and airy as a parasol in the wind. 

What sets Lucca Dohr apart, though, is the tension between his surroundings and himself, each moment of summer joy shaded and restrained with the bittersweet. “Sometimes….my day goes numb, and then it turns night,” he sings, detached enough to have a thousand-yard stare. As his lover walks out the door, a part of Dohr seems to follow: “I’ve lost myself in you, and you’ve lost yourself in me.” The heat of the rush is gone, and Dohr is left “freezing”, half-vacant. As if to say, all good things….

Of the song’s conception, Dohr explains, “Prior to ‘Winter’s Coming’, I had never really written anything super upbeat with a more ‘pop’ sound. It’s a genre that I am new to. Ben Chandler and I had a Zoom session in November of 2020. I remember him saying something like, ‘I got this little guitar line’, and we both immediately dug the vibe.”