Q&A: Oracle Sisters Illuminate a New Chapter with ‘Divinations – Outtakes Edition’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photo Credit: Madison Rensing
THE OUTTAKES THAT SHINE — Paris-based trio Oracle Sisters return with Divinations – Outtakes Edition, a deluxe expansion of their widely acclaimed sophomore album and a luminous counterpart to its darker original narrative. Released February 14, 2025, Divinations cemented the band’s reputation for creating celestial, richly layered dream-pop. Now, with the Outtakes Edition, the band throws the curtains open, letting sunlight spill into the world they built.
Where the original record embraced shadow and esoteric reflection, the Outtakes Edition reveals what was happening just outside the frame: the warmth and the unguarded moments of creativity that shaped the sessions behind the scenes. These six additions offer listeners a rare glimpse into the band’s process.
“Divinations was always meant to be an album that felt both grounded and transcendent,” Lewis Lazar says. “With the Outtakes Edition, we wanted to share some of the sweeter songs written behind the recording process. These tracks add new dimensions to the story, like paprika.”
One of six new offerings on the tracklist – including the previously released “Hoagy’s Place” and “Wait For Me” - is the lead single “Lonestar,” written after a night out at ‘Sam’s Town Point’ while touring through Austin, Texas. It weaves airy harmonies with a back beat reminiscent of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, and lyrics of a late-night meeting of New Orleans musicians outside an Austin honky-tonk. It’s a postcard from the road and an inside joke rolled into a lovelorn ballad.
With Divinations – Outtakes Edition, Oracle Sisters don’t simply revisit their past, they broaden it. These songs illuminate the spaces between the shadows, revealing the color, curiosity and playfulness that shaped the Divinations era.
Photo Credit: Madison Rensing
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
CHRIS: I think there's always been something that’s quite nurturing in our music, and it's something you can envelop yourself in and it can be quite comforting. I think certainly, when we started out, we were writing songs in small spaces, small apartments in Paris, on classical guitars and working in harmony, which is something which wraps you. In Divinations, we tried to create something that had a slightly more brutal element to it, explored harsher sounding drum machines and something that was a little bit more in your face.
JULIA: To break the romantic bubble that was identified within us as well.
LUNA: You also just released the deluxe version for Divinations and huge congratulations! You’ve described the original Divinations as both “grounded and transcendent.” How do the outtakes expand or shift that original vision?
JULIA: We had a bunch of songs that we made that we then had to obviously choose these 11 songs for Divinations. Then the leftover outtakes that we have, they were more playful and they had a different sort of dimension to them. We just picked them and heard the coherence of those ones together and thought there was something about them that didn't fit into the ones that we chose.
CHRIS: You have a bit of creative freedom with an outtakes extension of an album. It's like wild cards in a way. You really want an album to be coherent and have a delicate balance of the songs. It doesn't mean they'll have to sound the same, obviously, but there's a balance there that we all agree on, and you feel like it's finished. When someone's making a painting, it feels like it's done all of a sudden. Then we had all these other songs that we thought were still cool, and it was fun to show them, but without putting too much emphasis on them for people to be able to hear those songs which are quite different sounding from each other and from the record.
LUNA: Divinations (Outtakes Edition) feels like opening a hidden door into the album’s world. At what point did you realize these songs needed to be shared, rather than stay in the vault?
CHRIS: I think there were some cheeky songs and we thought it would just be really fun to release those into the world at the moment, as well as some deeper, more emotional ones.
LEWIS: I think a lot of bands wait till they're 70 to release their vaults. Who knows what the world will look like when we're 70, so we're releasing them now
LUNA: Did revisiting these songs change how you view the finished version of Divinations? Do you hear the original album differently now?
LEWIS: I listened to it this morning because of Spotify wrapped. I think that the Outtakes are actually a balance. Divinations is a little darker and Outtakes were more sunny, which is what we didn't really put it on the album. It didn't fit with the mood as much, but now it's a representation of where we were at when we were writing. We don't like to be constrained in our styles, and we like to write in lots of different styles. It's just really a reflection of that time period as a body, as a piece of work. It's a portrait of that time.
LUNA: Looking back at the original Divinations almost a year later, how do you feel about the album and its impact?
LEWIS: The response was amazing from the crowds, and we're playing bigger shows than the year before and there was a good feeling playing those songs.
CHRIS: Whenever you put a lot of work into an album, when you get to take them on tour, it's a big release moment to be able to share them with people and feel the energy back from people. I think now that we've just come off our big US tour, it's hard to look back on Divinations right now, to be honest, because we still have our head in new ideas and writing. I think it's a record we're proud of. If we had to critique it, there would be certain things we could critique. If you did a critique in the time you move forward, you move forward and then there could be things you could change about the production of certain songs, but you don't really want to waste time thinking about that stuff.
LEWIS: Overall, I think we made the album in really tricky circumstances as well. We come off a tour. We've been touring a lot the last few years, and there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes — health and family. It was an album made in this adversity, and I feel like it's great that we came through it, and we learned a lot, and we really went in the independent route on this album where we put it out on our own label and we produced it ourselves. I think it was an achievement in terms of independence and that experience and doing everything yourself. We learned a lot doing that.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the outtakes album — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Oracle Sisters are right now?
JULIA: “High with the Wind” is a touchy one for me. But then I also had a lot of fun with “Wait For Me,” just from the beginning of the conception of the song
LEWIS: For me, it doesn't reflect where we're going at all, but it's more of a reflection of, for me, what we had fun doing or trying at the time, but I think it doesn't reflect the new sound or the new direction is going to be very different. But, If there's a favorite, I think the second half of “There's One Thing,” I really like how it builds and changes tempo. We haven't done many songs that have three parts and change tempo. I don't know if it achieved it, but I love “Abbey Road” and the medley at the end. It was the first experimentation of a song like that, so I feel like they reflect experimentations in types of songs that weren't maybe the ideal versions of them, but some of them are just exploring a type of songwriting.
CHRIS: “Hoagy’s Place” because I do my Bob Dylan impression.
LUNA: What do you hope your listeners can take away from Divinations (Outtakes Edition)? Any messages or emotions you want to leave them with?
CHRIS: I think it's just a fun thing for listeners to be able to experience when they experience Divinations, and if it's meant something to them, they can just add this different color to it and feel. They're definitely sunnier songs. I think it's just a gift of sorts, and I hope whatever people take from it, it's really letting people into everything we were doing at that time.
JULIA: It’s nice for people to feel uplifted.
LUNA: What is fueling your fire right now that’s pushing you into this next chapter in your career?
JULIA: Currently in this little village where me and Lewis live, and we've set up a whole home studio in my house and we've been jamming songs every day since Monday. We're cooking and we're hanging out with cats.
CHRIS: I think it always comes back to songwriting mainly, and wanting to get deeper into that always. I think you can always get deeper and better. So that's one important element, kind of the core, I think the quest of the perfect song, and then there's the experiment. I think it's really fun to experiment within the framework of songwriting, to experiment with sounds and to try and surprise ourselves, I think, is the most important thing as well. I'd say that's a strong part of what's fueling our fire right now.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
LEWIS: Next year for the band, we're making a new record. We've been touring a lot, and this time, we really want to take the time to marinate and make something that's not rushed and that we really get the production right on. We really feel like it's deeper. We've gone as far as we can possibly go at this time with a piece of work. I don't know if we'll be touring next year, but next year is going to be maybe a little touring, but the main thing is making this record and then releasing it.
CHRIS: We're allowing ourselves the time to get as deep into our work as possible.
JULIA: We're feeling good about this year, like we toured a lot and saw many different highways and gas stations on the road. I think there's a sense of relief as well to let go.
LEWIS: Because those experiences are so intense that you can't process them straight away, and then it takes a while to sort of process everything.
JULIA: I think winter is also a very nice time to hibernate, and to go deep into finding those new ideas, new songs.
LEWIS: Right now, we're recording on tape a lot, and we're trying to make music that's pretty much entirely captured live in a space, and writing songs in that spirit. I think part of what we're trying to capture is a more sort of raw, authentic sound, something maybe a little less produced around the edges, but more raw and alive.
Photo Credit: Madison Rensing
