Ambar Lucid

With a youthful voice that moves quickly between delicate, jazzy, and assertively soulful, Ambar Lucid began sharing her seductively off-center bedroom recordings as a high school student in 2017. Combining folk-styled fingerpicking, atmospheric electric guitar, dreamy electronics, and occasional horns and beats, her full-length debut, Dreaming Lucid, saw release in 2018 and was followed in 2020 by the more sonically robust Garden of Lucid.
Raised partly in the Dominican Republic and mostly in the New York City suburb of Little Ferry, New Jersey, Ambar Cruz mixed Spanish and English lyrics from her earliest shared songs under the alias Ambar Lucid, including the 2017 viral acoustic track “A Letter to My Younger Self.” That song and others were collected on the album Dreaming Lucid in early 2018. She followed it in mid-2018 with the EP Mi Historia before her song “Listen” was featured alongside tracks by Jaden Smith, Clairo, Princess Nokia, and others on the soundtrack to the film Skate Kitchen, released later the same year. By that time, she’d begun playing shows in and around N.Y.C. with a backing band. A pair of singles arrived in 2019, followed in early 2020 by Lucid’s second album, Garden of Lucid. The following year saw the release of the five-track Get Lost in the Music. ~ Marcy Donelson