“I hope my music can unlock emotions in people,” says Luke Armstrong, whose alternative pop radiates with kinetic urgency, certain to shift something in anyone with a beating heart. On his forthcoming EP ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ infectious rhythms and buoyant melodies lift whipsmart, emotionally turbulent lyrics in a vibrant span of sonic inspirations—from Frank Ocean to David Bowie to The 1975. Recorded with GRAMMY-nominated producer Daniel James (Hayley Williams, David Byrne, Wild Cub, Efterklang), it’s an effervescent collection as likely to evoke tears as it is dancing. “I like that contradiction between dark and light, struggle and joy,” Armstrong adds. “It’s true to life.”  

Armstrong was born and raised in Beirut. The son of American academics and missionaries, he grew up speaking English and Arabic, navigating questions about his own identity—sexual, religious, and political—from a very young age. “I was an intense child,” he says, half-laughing. “Music has always helped me process that intensity.” He recalls a home video in which his father is playing guitar, while Armstrong, not quite three years old, dances with unabashed passion, belting as many words as he knew at the top of his little lungs. When his older brother started taking music lessons a few years later, Armstrong begged to do the same. By age six, he was learning classical piano and teaching himself guitar, labors of love he continued through adolescence. 

“I’d come home from school with a big frown about something, and my mom would ask ‘Luke, what’s wrong?’ I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just sit down at the piano and bang it out. Melodies came out unconsciously—like a prayer, or a really raw journal entry.” 

The EP’s title track examines some of those early internal conflicts. “Even as a kid, I felt viscerally aware of the performance of masculinity,” says Armstrong. “The resistance to vulnerability—‘boys will be boys’—I couldn’t always relate.” Long before he’d fully embraced his own queerness, Armstrong could see that his own sensitivity set him apart. With the standout song, he transforms what once felt like a misalignment with the world around him into a celebratory groove of self-actualization: Boys don’t cry / I don’t really know how to fake it though / so take me home. 

Armstrong’s early influences ran the gamut—from the steady Christian rock you might expect to hear in a pastor’s household, to the darker moods of metal and alternative you might not, to the bright, sparkling, and refreshingly inarticulate thrill of electronica and house music, which Armstrong considers life-changing. “I was around twelve when my brother and his friends got into DJing. I’d set up the living room with gear if they were coming over. Just imagine a little kid with cables snaking all around him, waiting for someone to come make beats with him.” 

Armstrong left Beirut to play college basketball in Southern California, and through the commitments of school and sports, continued producing and writing. “I’m still an intense person,” he says. “I still need music.” That call to create escalated when he connected with Daniel James, whose highly qualified interest was more than encouragement; it was a cosmic dare to do it fully. “Every time music comes back up in my life, it feels even more powerful,” says Armstrong. “Why not just chase it all the way?” He made his post-grad pilgrimage to Los Angeles and dug in—living in an apartment infested with mold among other things, working as a waiter/security guard/Uber Eats driver, and writing music every day.  

There’s a colorful spontaneity to Armstrong’s craft, likely owed to his instinctual, stream-of-consciousness approach. “Back Back” vibrates with an athletic verbosity, a palpitating freestyle written in the wake of a breakup, a sleepless night, and a long drive. The melody oscillates with relatable mania, but finds grounding in Armstrong’s precocity: Holy growing / We feed the fire and fold them / They take our work and withholding / So I’m rolling for the coping. Says Armstrong, “I kept asking myself, ‘What can I really learn from this? How can I take the experience with me?’”

Armstrong wrote “2000” from a fictional perspective living in the title year, detaching himself from Western life to illuminate—and perhaps scrutinize—its reckless nature: Put it all on credit / You’ll be fine don’t fucking sweat it. The song’s urgent, unrelenting rhythm feels enthralling and imminently doomed, a bit like life in America, as Armstrong artfully collages images of cultural chaos: Picket line screaming saying ‘check the word says!’ / I’ve been checked out, couldn’t get that abortion / Picking out my feed, gotta pick up my food stamps / Working all the way to the weekend.

Both “Heavenbound” and “Little Wins” (the latter co-written with Julian Cruz, known for his work with Dominic Fike) address the heartrending violence and volatility in Armstrong’s home country. The former unfolds over zagging, ‘80s-esque guitars with the tenderness of a letter to a lost love: I can’t leave you / Cause I need you / Even if you never needed me. It’s Beirut that Armstrong’s grieving, as well as his place in it. I know you know that I can make my own hell / But heaven always ends up on fire / And I know you know me better than I know my own self / I make my own hell. 

He wrote “Little Wins” in response to Israel’s intensifying bombings in Beirut in 2024. “I was stuck in LA traffic, talking on the phone with a friend in Lebanon,” says Armstrong. “Every time a bomb hit, his door would shake. How do you make sense of it? Me here. Him there.” It was at this same time that wildfires in California were raging to a historic level. “How do you keep going?” With “Little Wins,” he strings together tiny moments of survival—I’m stuck in the noise / But I’m calling the boys—positing their sum as the point of existence. Is it even a life / If you never arrive / at the little wins? 

Armstrong doesn’t hide from the darkness. “There’s an opportunity to face fear with art, to surrender to what scares you, process it, and come through.” He confronts the shadows and from within them, sheds light, searches for light, even makes the light himself, driven by a bold determination to keep moving forward. And his songs do just that—propulsive bangers compelled by sociocultural undercurrents, steered with the compassionate wisdom of a global citizen, flowing into exaltation. “I want to be honest about human suffering, and to make a statement about what a better world can look like.”




Artist Bio by Maddie Corbin