and downright stupefying songcraft," and noted that "Lerche manages to both push himself and maintain an allegiance to his ways – something artists twice his age have trouble doing." On 27 February 2006, Duper Sessions was released. The jazz album was recorded in the fall of 2005 with his band the Faces Down and pianist Erik Halvorsen at Duper Studios in Bergen. The album reached No. 21 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart. His February 2007 release, Phantom Punch, is a rock album with a more aggressive sound than his previous work. Lerche and the Faces Down recorded and mixed the album in Los Angeles in April and May 2006, with producer Tony Hoffer. In September 2009, Lerche released Heartbeat Radio, to critical acclaim. While it maintained the studio polish of his groundbreaking debut, there was also a sense of musical adventure that mixed acoustic guitars with grand gestures of orchestral pop, elements of 1950s Jazz, 1960s and 1970s Brazilian psych-folk, and state-of-the-art 1980s pop masters such as Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti and Fleetwood Mac. In his review, Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "No matter what genre he's working in – fuzzy garage rock, breezy vocal jazz, acoustic folk-pop – this young Norwegian singer-songwriter crafts catchier choruses than many musicians who’ve been working twice as long as he has." Allmusic Guide's Tim Sendra called Heartbeat Radio Sondre's "best work to date." In June 2011, Lerche released the self-titled Sondre Lerche, on his own Mona Records. Praised by Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Stereogum, Filter, Spin, and Entertainment Weekly among others for its experimentation with contrasting musical sounds, this eponymous album contains Lerche's most interesting arrangements and catchy songwriting to date, but also some of his most somber and introspective. In the studio, Lerche wanted to explore his new creative alliances in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he's lived on and off for the previous six years. The album was recorded – live in the studio – and mixed in a short but intense time period of three weeks. The sessions included fellow musicians – Midlake drummer McKenzie Smith, longtime producer/collaborator Kato Ådland, Dave Heilman (drummer for Regina Spektor), and co-producer, mixer, and owner of Rare Book Room Studio, Nicolas Verhnes (Spoon, Animal Collective). Lerche celebrated his 30th birthday with the release of his first live album, Bootlegs, in 2012. Lerche wrote and recorded Please following his