Lord Huron explores 'the big mysteries' on the band's latest album

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Kimberly Junod

Published September 12, 2025 at 9:55 AM PDT

It's easy to get lost in the world Lord Huron creates with their music. It's a lush, strange, blurry universe full of recurring characters, nostalgia and mystery.

In this session, Lord Huron frontman Ben Schneider talks about the importance of mystery in art and why it's something that draws so many people into their work.

"It feels like a song is about them, or written for them, because in a lot of ways it is," he says. "I think everybody thinks about the things our music is about, you know, the big mysteries: love, consciousness, the cosmos."

Sponsor Message

Schneider gets into the way they explore those things in the songs on Lord Huron's new album, The Cosmic Selector Vol 1. Plus, the band performs live.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Tags

World Cafe NPR Music

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).