Photo by Guy Kozak
A hermit keeps crawling.
October 15, 2026
BY Jack Lubin
As Cooper B. Handy laid his head to rest, he had a vision of a cuckoo clock being battered by rain and storm winds. “I was stoked about that cuckoo clock,” he tells me with a laugh. After driving an hour-and-a-half each way to pick up the antique from somebody’s garage in New Haven, Connecticut, he attempted to recreate his pre-sleep apparition in the music video for the skittering lead single of his stellar new record, CITIZEN’S ARREST. Insofar as the “COURTSIDE” video did not quite match the dramatic scene he’d anticipated, he has since worked to center the surprisingly colorful, pinecone-sheathed clock on his tour flyer. Why? Because cuckoo clocks don’t appear much in pop culture—though, he caveats responsibly, he’s sure that some cinephile would let him know that it’s been done before. No small amount of ink has been spilled to triangulate the je ne sais quoi of LUCY, Western Massachusetts’ DIY impresario. Outsider artist? Nursery-rapping trickster? In-crowd demigod? Why overcomplicate it? LUCY is the sort of artist sprung into action by visions of a cuckoo clock in a rainstorm.
CITIZEN’S ARREST, released last week, sees pop music’s underground prince push further into left field. What LUCY somewhat reservedly describes to me as his “folk art album” finds him shimmying with mortality, flicking cigarette ash onto the highway, and puffing his chest as he shakes the clock’s hand. Longtime fans will find a mid-career masterpiece that strikes a balance between conventionally legible LUCY songs, live instrumentation, and advanced song construction. New listeners will find a reason to sink their teeth into the cult titan whose flowers, such as they come, are never quite enough.
Cooper Handy was raised around music—his maternal grandfather was a jazz drummer and his paternal grandmother played showtunes on the piano—but as a young child he was predominantly concerned with BET, VH1, and MTV. “I was sort of glued to that after school,” he says, describing a fixation with turn-of-the-millennium hip-hop and his attempts as a seven-year-old to dress like the rappers he saw on television. A recent Instagram post of a young Handy swimming in oversized jorts and a nondescript football pinnie as he listens to a jukebox in reverence paints the picture nicely. He never moved past his obsession with rap music, but his quintessentially suburban musical education began in earnest as a response to his experience at Warped Tour as a twelve-year-old, the milieu that prompted him to start recording pop-punk music. He recalls tween-years guitar lessons largely wasted on the power chord-heavy CDs he brought to them. Handy’s public mythos began itself in earnest right around the time that he moved from Cape Cod to Western Massachusetts after high school, where he fell in with the Western-Mass-by-way-of-Al-Gore’s-Internet collective Dark World, and began releasing music as LUCY while replacing milk bags and filling soda dispensers in Amherst College’s dining hall.
Across his work as LUCY, his post-punk band The Taxidermists, his and Augustus Miller’s synth-pop duo Safe Mind, and his dance-pop project Club Casualties with producer Ghost, he releases music at a staggering clip that evokes mixtape-era Gucci Mane or turn-of-the-decade Lil B. Handy is constantly recording music; the only question, in his words, is whether he is in a cycle where the music he’s recording works or does not work. With a laugh, he describes a recent month where he either “struck out or was just making, like, really fried hip hop beats” for which he’s now in the market for an interested rapper. Yet Handy’s litmus test for what music of his sees the light of day is refreshingly simple: “If the words make sense, and if I’m in the studio and find myself physically moving while I’m listening to a mix, that’s a good sign.” It’s the sort of approach that LUCY fans likely could have intuited on their own; his songs often sound like transmissions from a station that you grew up on but for which only he has the dial.
Photo by Guy Kozak
For the uninitiated, the sheer amount of LUCY music out there can feel as daunting as it does exhilarating. When discussing his newest effort, Handy suggests that he was subjected to some mild nudging away from his preferred solo album naming conventions, which would have made this Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 10, for fear that new listeners might skim through what could be misconstrued as a late-career mixtape. Instead, we got CITIZEN’S ARREST, a name that he had been toying with for about a year and a half.
In explaining his inspiration behind the title, he walks me through a sort of thinking that we might call Handyesque, identifying a preoccupation with the strangeness in the everyday that gets to the heart of his outre American poetry. Citizen’s arrest, per Handy, is the sort of term that everyone’s heard a million times, but which remains malleable in its vagueness. A citizen’s arrest is the domain of the quintessentially deranged American on a power trip, but at its heart lies a significant philosophical query: Who gets the authority to hold a person, or audience, captive?
CITIZEN’S ARREST, then, can be understood as LUCY’s case for why he deserves your captive attention. On those terms, the album is a resounding success, excelling both as an entrée for the LUCY-curious and a high-water mark of the oddball’s mid-career expansion into increased reliance on live instrumentation and lived-in ditties. Across its eighteen tracks, the record flits between hypnagogic pop sketches, creaky upright piano ballads, ragtime dance-offs, twee ballads, and LUCY’s by-now-infamous massive IP flips and interpolations. As is by now typical, these tracks feel more like inspired flashes in the pan than belabored, focus-tested anthems, yet they burrow their way underneath your skin and impart upon you an almost impressionistic wisdom. Take lead single “COURTSIDE,” which operates around a Russian Doll refrain:
“She always sits courtside when I’m playing my game, don’t know why/I always sit courtside when she’s playing my game, don’t know why/The bodies lie courtside, and we’re watching the game, don’t know why.”
Is it a love song? A testament to the power of bearing witness and the validation of being seen? When I ask him about it, he recalls watching basketball on TV and seeing all of the celebrities chilling courtside, which he somehow carried into a meditation on the ethics of watching: “It’s like you can be a bystander in ways that are good and bad, you know?” Asking him about his lyrics, I find, often goes this way—Handy has a knack for converting banal observations into koans.
One imagines, upon taking in his All-American looks, that Cooper is far from the first Handy to cultivate a doggedly Protestant work ethic in a quiet town in New England. What makes this Handy’s drive so compelling is that it is mobilized in service of creating some of the most fried, felt, and far-out pop music currently on offer. Though his life has changed significantly since leaving his job at Amherst two years ago—among other things, the lack of a steady paycheck has made finances a tricky game—Handy’s recording process remains consistent and largely solitary. An outdoor creature who spends his time hiking, walking, and biking even in the brutal Massachusetts winter, he typically does not get to his studio until the sun goes down. To spend daylight hours in his small, windowless space is to ask oneself, “Why am I in this little box?”
Handy is no stranger to collaboration, but with the exception of his work alongside childhood friend Salvador McNamara as the Taxidermists, almost all of his songs are recorded alone in that aforementioned little room. He describes a discomfort about working in professional studio spaces, recalling a session in New York City ahead of his collaborative EP with Surf Gang that resulted in essentially no workable vocals. Handy comes across not as a prima donna or a control freak, but as someone who needs to be comfortable in order to create and who struggles understandably with relinquishing control: “When there’s someone between my voice and where the recording ends up, it’s hard for me to get fully loose with it.”
That CITIZEN’S ARREST is being released through a label distribution deal speaks to Handy’s attempts to shake some of his precautionary instincts. When reflecting on his first label-backed foray, 2021’s delightfully-titled The Music Industry Is Poisonous, he expresses a rare regret regarding how the project turned out. “I am glad that album came out,” he says, “but for some reason it’s a harder one for me to listen to…I think I was just confused about the production with that one, and I was having mental trouble having it come out on a label.”
This comment sticks with me because Handy is the sort of person who expresses few regrets, a trait that’s particularly noteworthy in someone who has spent so much of his life sharing his music online. You do not build a project as prolific as LUCY’s by being precious, but Handy still considers himself fortunate to feel pride in his body of work. “I feel lucky,” he reflects, “because I definitely have some friends who don’t want to hear their music from ten years ago. Everything I’ve ever done with LUCY, it makes me happy to revisit. Sometimes I learn from it, or I’m like, shit, I want to figure out how to do some of that again.”
Handy also speaks fondly of his time as a working musician, describing how the routine, physical work in both food service and catering gave his mind license to run wild in a way not dissimilar to transcendental meditation. What’s more is that he misses his coworkers. “Working with people that you don’t choose to work with is a beautiful thing. Whereas, like, in this music shit, I can’t just surround myself with artists, because that’s pointless—I won’t learn anything.” After I find myself in the embarrassing position of explaining the concept of “coworker music” to a musician whom I admire, Handy fondly recalls being shown “some fried, like, white reggae or something during smoke breaks” back at his old job: “It’s like data collection.”
Photo by Sam Resetarits
Now, Handy catches about half of his ideas while out and about during the day, whether driving, walking, or biking to the studio. Often, he will record a melody or “little hook” to his cell phone’s voice memos. Other times, what he finds are simply a swirl of words. For instance, “FANCY CHANDELIER,” the album’s disarmingly beautiful, anti-materialist anthem, began as an impromptu freestyle he laid over the smooth jazz radio station playing in his car (Handy jokes that he envisioned someone sitting in a Silence of the Lambs-style pit with only a beautiful chandelier above them). “FORGIVABLE,” a profound and raw plea over chopped-up keys, was similarly conceived as “FORGIVABLE BASED FREESTYLE.”
It makes sense that so many LUCY songs would be born as freestyles over the radio. He leaves his computer in his studio and has neither WiFi nor a television in his house, so when Handy is home, he is typically listening to the radio. He describes a “kind of stupid channel” that plays oldies from the 60s and 70s, down to the same recycled era-appropriate commercial jingles. He’s kind of burnt out on the station, but he likes to test himself to see how many songs he can identify on the radio without looking them up. “Not in a total, like, freak encyclopedic way,” he laughs,” I just like to see the lineage of how music evolved.” It’s a creative backdrop that informs his work: look no further than his fondness for, well, big samples or his seemingly unprovoked jab at Tom Petty on the album’s penultimate, colossal “CHECK ON ANYBODY.”
“You know that song that’s like, ‘You don’t have to live like a refugee?’ Every time I hear that shit on the radio and his voice is kind of whiny, I’m like, ‘What are you even talking about?’ But, no shade—he also has a lot of good songs.”
It’s less that LUCY’s music emulates the oldies, though, than it is that his music operates by the logic of a certain timelessness. Take it from Eric Deines, who, aside from co-founding the indie label ULYSSA (which distributed LUCY’s 2024 100% Prod. I.V.) curates the “Annals of Cooper B. Handy” playlist, which serves as an invaluable resource for the LUCY-curious-and-superfan alike. “I was on a road trip to Florida and just started back-to-back-to-backing ‘Rock, The,’ with a weirdo track from Tusk, and I was like: I’m cracking the code on Cooper B. Handy. He’s fucking Lindsey Buckingham!”
Where, then, does one place LUCY? His music, produced as it is largely on GarageBand, is tangibly contemporary. But Handy’s voice and sensibilities can go a long way toward obscuring that fact. One hears in his output many of the strains that have defined the 2020s critical canon, from the dogged on-their-own-terms-ness of Cindy Lee and Women’s Pat Flegel, to the ability to establish a recognizable yet boundary-pushing style of Chuquimamani-Condori and Los Thuthanaka’s Elysia Crampton. LUCY is the sort of artist whose associative songwriting and compulsive output imbues his work with an almost shamanic bent. His music dances with the collective unconscious, concerned as it is with functionally everything, but remains grounded by his own humility and sincerity.
Photo by Annabell P. Lee
To call CITIZEN’S ARREST mature and sober would imply that LUCY’s other music lacks these qualities; better, then, to say that it continues LUCY’s observable process of growing up. Though Handy is not pearl-clutching about his music (he prefers to eschew album rollouts, release on his own terms, and let his songs connect with whomever they’re meant to connect), I detect in him a level of mild frustration with how his music has been misperceived in the past. Though he does not bristle at the fact that his style has been categorized as “nursery rap,” he emphasizes that there’s no intentional cheekiness or humor to his sensibilities. If anything, he adds, many nursery rhymes are poignant. More difficult is the notion that his music is intentionally ironic: “It’s not really like that at all. I’m serious. When people are like, the music’s so serious and funny at the same time…that’s cool if you feel like that, but none of it really feels funny to me.”
Perhaps it is as a corrective, then, that CITIZEN’S ARREST is serious without skewing dour, sincere while not preaching. Taken in its entirety, it is a record about persevering with dignity while, as he raps on “CHECK ON ANYBODY”: “Time slaps you on the wrist and tells you where to go.” On “APPEARANCE,” one might even hear a mission statement: “I don’t give a fuck about keeping up appearance, I’m just living my days/All I’ve got to do is outlive my parents.”
Perhaps, then, Handy’s storm-weathered timekeeper was in fact a mission statement delivered on a hot, Massachusetts summer night. Just because time is inevitable does not mean that it must be feared. What does a cuckoo clock do if not celebrate the seemingly mundane turning of its hands with a song so sincere that it can be misunderstood as a joke?