His next highly anticipated album, "The Essential Gary Lucas" (Knitting Factory Records), a 36-track, two-CD anthology which will be released in January, 2021, spanned 40 years of Lucas's music. Broadway World wrote that the album, “offers ample evidence of this maverick artist's trailblazing and unique career... a truly epic body of work that spans psychedelic rock, film music, classical, electronica, jazz, blues, avant-garde, and world music excursions through 1930s Chinese pop, Hungarian folk, raga, and more, all unified by Lucas's virtuosic guitar and ceaselessly questing spirit.”