Judah & the Lion Open Up About Heartache and Joy That Inspired “The Process”: 'Hopeful' It Can Be 'Healing' (Exclusive)

Judah Akers and Brian Macdonald's new album is broken down into the five stages of grief

• Judah & the Lion's new album The Process is broken down into the five different stages of grief

• The album covers a difficult stretch for frontman Judah Akers that included a divorce and mental health struggles

• Akers has since found happiness again, and will marry fiancée Sina George in June

Sitting in the sunny backyard of a Los Angeles AirBnB, hours before they’re set to play before a small acoustic show just down the road, Judah & the Lion’s Judah Akers and Brian Macdonald are talking twang — specifically, the southern accent Tennessee native Akers brought with him to college.

“I came to Belmont [University] to play baseball, and a lot of baseball players were from Chicago,” he says. “It was very evident that I was a Southern hick, so I remember going back after that first semester and practicing. I was so self-conscious of it.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Akers lost his sense of self. Over the last few years, the musician has endured a difficult stretch that included a painful divorce, the deaths of his aunt and uncle, and mental health setbacks.

But now, he's come out the other side a healed man. His and Macdonald’s new album The Process (out now) chronicles those ups and downs, breaking its tracklist down into the five stages of grief.

“The heart of the record is hope and healing and love,” says Akers, 33. “I like to believe that music can kind of do that for people. Our hope is that in the way that it’s been healing for the two of us in our own journey, I am hopeful that it can be healing for others.”

Through a series of earworms that range from folksy stomp-alongs and surf rock tunes to pop-punk anthems, Akers and Macdonald lay bare the denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance that came with a period Akers calls his “lowest point.”

Related: How Rachel Chinouriri Is Using Her Debut Album to Make Sense of 'Trauma': 'I Find Music Quite Healing' (Exclusive)

“We wanted to call it The Process because I think getting to acceptance and forgiveness for oneself or others is being able to hold all that at once,” Akers says. “That’s the process, is finding a way to be okay with the fact that sometimes I wake up and I’m just pissed off at the world. But when I started looking at my anger and being like, ‘Why do I feel this way?’, working through that became the process for us.”

Akers and Macdonald, 31, formed Judah & the Lion in 2011 after meeting at Belmont. Both of their mothers are therapists, something Akers says was helpful in coming to terms with his feelings, especially as a Southern athlete who was encouraged to “rough” out his emotions for most of his life.

Though the band released its fourth album Revival in 2022, the record didn’t cover all that Akers was dealing with at the time. Around 2017, he lost his aunt to suicide, and then his uncle as well in the middle of the pandemic.

On top of that, his marriage to wife Lindsey Riley was ending; Akers filed for divorce in May 2022 after nearly seven years of marriage. Though the emotional pain that followed (A doctor telling Akers he was suffering “heartbreak syndrome” inspired a song title) was overwhelming, he struggled to put his feelings into song.

“Divorce is in a lot of ways like a failure. It’s definitely a defeat. It’s embarrassing. You feel guilty, and all these kinds of emotions are all happening at once,” he says. “I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like to be alone. Even when I was going through it, when we were writing our last record Revival, me and [Macdonald] were having these conversations of, ‘I don’t know how to write about this, and I’m just writing angry songs.’ But you have to write them.”

And, eventually, write them he did. Akers says a series of panic attacks spooked him into the realization that you never know what someone else is going through at any given moment — and with that came a renewed sense of empathy.

Before long, forgiveness was in reach, and writing songs like “Long Dark Night,” on which Akers sings of his ex-wife’s “cheating,” helped move that process along.

"It felt wrong to not be honest. We really debated on bringing it up at all. I don’t have an ounce of judgment toward her now, and I also did not want to make her feel bad,” he says of his ex. “I didn’t want to hurt her, that’s not our intention with our music. But I did want to honor that because someone out there has been cheated on and that f---ing sucks. The focus isn’t on that, it’s on the healing part.”

Songs like “Heart Medicine” show just how far Akers’ healing journey has come. In June, he’ll marry fiancée Sina George, to whom he proposed last September.

“My best friends at the time were trying to do whatever they could to stop my self-loathing. He looked at me and he goes, ‘What makes you think you don’t deserve love?’ And I said, ‘Well no, I know that I deserve love, but I just don’t know if I’m ready,’” Akers recalls.

The friend encouraged Akers to put himself out there and have some fun — and the very first date he went on was with George.

“Of course the first person I meet was this lovely, beautiful person,” he says. “I’m so obsessed with Sina. This is going to sound so cheesy, but when she really looked me in the eyes and it held, I really felt seen. That was when I was like, ‘OK, you kind of match my intensity like I’ve never really felt before.’ And I think that was when I was gone.”

With his most difficult stretch now behind him, Akers is focused on the good ahead.

“Writing these songs was kind of going back to my past self and really having empathy,” he says. “I think the record kind of forced that. You don’t really realize it until you go back and resurface those emotions from a healthier spot like, ‘Damn, that was tough.’”

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