Imagine you’re trapped inside a machine, looking for a way out. You feel a cold beat and tense rhythm, hear bleeps lurking in the background. It’s unsettling. Then, in the distance, a voice repeats the phrase you know from Dune. “Fear is the mind killer.” You see Timothée Chalamet or Kyle MacLachlan or some other Paul Atreides who lives in your head survive the box of pain. You feel relief.
That’s what it’s like to hear “Fear (is the Mind Killer),” the Optometry song, for the first time. From Lemuria, the L.A.-based duo’s sophomore album, the song is an homage to Dune as much as it is a reflection on life in the 2020s.
“That whole concept of fear holding you back from what you want to do, or holding you back from challenging yourself, really resonated with me,” says Adstrum, who read the first book in Frank Herbert’s classic series and says it’s now one of her favorites. She wanted to apply the concept to a contemporary situation, though. Adstrum adds, “the song is definitely about the computer age and how tapped in we are to that, and choosing to break away from that, or trying to break away from that.”
“Fear (is the Mind Killer)” also plays like a mantra for a duo that is taking on new challenges in their work. Optometry is Adstrum and John Tejada, both of whom are also solo artists. Adstrum, who has been releasing music since 2021, is more on the indie rock side, whereas Tejada has been making electronic music since the mid 1990s. Their first album, After-Image, released in 2023, came together primarily through remote collaboration. For Lemuria, which came out in February, they wrote everything together in the studio.
Songs emerged as they got excited about pieces of gear and riffed off each other. For example, “Star Crossed,” Adstrum explains, began when Tejada pulled up a Prophet synth patch. “I started getting into the zone playing some chords and wrote this little chord progression,” she says.
“That song was March doing all the synth production and then I thought I’d ‘80s it up with some LinnDrum,” adds Tejada.
On stage, too, the duo have landed in new situations. Last November, Optometry opened for LCD Soundsystem at L.A.’s Shrine Expo Hall. For Adstrum, it was her first show inside a larger venue— “I had never even set foot in the Shrine Expo,” she says— and performing with in-ear monitors. “I was definitely nervous because I had no idea what that’s going to be like,” she says. “But, it was a really big honor because I feel like LCD Soundsystem was an artist that really inspired me and having James Murphy reach out to us really meant a lot that he had heard our stuff even.”
Tejada, too, stepped out of his comfort zone for the performance. “I put it upon myself that I needed a little something to be a little bit nervous about,” he says, “so I learned a bunch of guitar parts and it’s very Freaky Friday now. We interchange roles sometimes that are unexpected.”
Previously, Optometry’s imagery came via artist Simone Ling. Following Ling’s passing last year, though, they have opted to create the visual language themselves. “I credit March as far as making me feel that I could even think visually because I thought that was something I couldn’t be good at,” says Tejada.
Right now, Tejada notes, Optometry is essentially making everything themselves. (Their music is released on his own label, Palette Recordings, as well.) “We’re going to create our own thing here and it’s going to be multifaceted and we’re going to have fun and not worry about where it goes,” he says.
Part of that includes worldbuilding. “Fear (is the Mind Killer)” is no outlier on Lemuria. “I think that whole concept of the sci-fi world reflecting stuff that’s going on in the real world was a big theme of this album,” says Adstrum. “I was reading and watching a lot of sci-fi books and films and just felt like it was helping me process the real world, going into these fantasy worlds.”
The title of the album, too, reflects the themes. Lemuria refers to the legend of a lost continent whose survivors are said to live in tunnels under Mt. Shasta in Northern California, near where Adstrum was raised. She says that the idea was to give the album a name that was “both close to heart and also mythical and sci-fi related.”
Like good science fiction and fantasy, Lemuria is grounded in humanity. Adstrum says she’s been thinking about organic creation and imperfection as a counter to today’s tech.
“I feel like AI and the recent technological advances are starting to smooth out that human touch of imperfection,” she says. “I know that some of my friends believe that we’re going to head to this direction where people aren’t even listening to artists anymore, they’re just listening to customized playlists of AI music and I think that’s very possible and that makes me want to basically destroy all of my phone stuff and just go back to listening to cassettes and making things in an analog way.”
Tejada adds, “I think all the new stuff is driven by big companies and money and it’s trying to make people feel like that’s what is happening. You hear so much about it– I’m sure, we all do– but people resonate with expression of vulnerability in humans.”
And that vulnerability is really what makes Lemuria stand out. It sounds like music made for other people to hear, not for an algorithm to push onto a timeline. In a cultural landscape where art is reduced to content, much of which is designed to— maybe, hopefully, cross-my-fingers— go viral, this is a powerful statement.
“I’m not afraid to say here that I have an anti-AI and an anti-capitalist view on art and just life in general,” says Adstrum. “I think that, as creators and artists, it’s our role to make something that reflects our hope for the future of what creation and society could look like or make a statement against what’s going on.”
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram for more updates.
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