A Review of Nick Lutsko's "Ends"

On January 22, 2025, Nick Lutsko dropped the video for "Run," a track off his new LP, Ends.

The video for "Run" is strange, funny, propulsive, and seems imbued with its creator's personal anxieties. Which is to say: it fits perfectly within the Nick Lutsko worldview.

I've spoken both about and with Nick for this newsletter in the past, but I'm back on the Lutsko beat thanks to Ends, which is available right now for his Patreon supporters, and coming at some unknown date for everyone else. For anyone who came to know Nick through his comedy songs (collected on the duology Songs on the Computer and More Songs on the Computer), it might be best to advise you that Ends is more a follow-up to his 2019 LP Swords than an extension of his novelty work. But I'd also argue Nick's work is more cohesive than such a distinction might suggest. Put simply, Nick's comedy songs rock, and his rock songs are funny.

Taking "Run" as an example, this track establishes many of the motifs featured on the album. As we see in the video, this is a song about running, about hurtling, about propulsion. And it's not the only one; in the title track, he sings about "Racing towards the end" while a yet-to-be-released video for the song "Reset" will extend this image even further. Nick is a restless musician, and his work is sharklike, eternally moving ahead in search of some new artistic feeding ground.

Nick is an endlessly inventive musician. That's the best term I can think of to sum up the arrangements on Ends. He serves as his own producer, and tends to produce while he writes (as he told me during a recent conversation, available now for his Patreon supporters). He also writes in chunks rather than thinking in verse/chorus/bridge schematic, moving from one chunk to another when the new one catches his ear. Thus, while his songs combine notes of pop, rock, and folk, they also flow in movements rather than verses. In that recent interview, Nick told me the worst advice he ever got came from his professors of commercial songwriting, who taught him formula and imitation with the goal of collaborating with superstars. In response, Nick's work pushes back with its eclecticism and defiant individuality, functioning in diametric opposition to that ethos. We're all the richer for it.

From the opening lines of Ends, it's apparent that Nick is a poetic writer who loves imagery and analogy. We open with him "carving words into sand" six syllables that carry a hefty weight of meaning. Meanwhile, references to the devil and holy rollers remind us of his Bible Belt upbringing. His best lyrics invite interpretation, opening up layers of enjoyment. Maybe my favorite combination of words on the album comes from maybe my favorite track, "Screen Turns Black": "I took a stand then kept on sittin." The line is clever, funny, and (especially in the context of Ends's wider considerations of the modern cultural climate) poignant simultaneously.

If Ends is "about" anything, it must be a sort of cross-section of the concerns and anxieties of a millennial dad in his mid-30s who lives much of his life online. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that I respond to it, but my own description is also slightly glib. This music is heavy in its powerful rock arrangements, but it's heavy in its concerns, too. This is a work about digital static, about encroaching mortality, about the struggle to communicate, and about the complicated effort of expressing love (among other topics). No small concerns for a guy who's also sung a song pitching a Gremlins 3 in which Gizmo helps found an accidentally fascist Gremlin nation and has a child with Jennifer Aniston.

Ends is a long album. It boasts 15 tracks, and clocks in at nearly an hour, putting it closer to the classic "double album" length than a traditional pop LP. But this album offers more than just extra tracks and bonus minutes. It's a work that rewards thought and revisitation. If nothing else, the lyrics could be pulled apart as poetry for an enjoyable hour or two, but that suggestion also implies some heady dullness.

Nick's music is anything but dull. Rather, it's eternally surprising, as evinced in the video for "Punchline," released December 18, 2024.

The video is a quiet marvel of invention and achievement, a single take that doesn't call attention to its own beauty and eeriness. Once again, Nick handily sums up his own approach to life, the universe, and everything in a few intricately plainspoken minutes.

The end of Ends is "Obituary," a song that's been out in the world since 2023, but one that feels like mandatory inclusion on the LP. It's an ideal capstone, toggling between the sublime and crass from line to line, if not word to word ("Writing my obituary," the song begins, "eggplant, peach, and fire emojis"). The track sits atop both a poppy drum loop and a folky plucked guitar lick, and Nick announces that he'll be "singin in the clouds while the sky falls down." That about sums it up. "It's all right," the backing vocals repeatedly assure us. "It's all right." Listening to this buoyant arrangement, you'd almost believe them. But then you might listen a little harder, and realize things are so much more complicated, and more interesting.

Ends is available now for Nick Lutsko's Patreon supporters, and will be released later this year for the general public.