""Get me out of America," Lillie West sings in the opening bars of "Car Anymore," the first song on Heaven 2. "Something in the water makes me sick." She has the deadpan tone of someone who's been watching the world implode for a while, the looping keyboard melody behind her like an arrhythmia. The microplastics have already saturated her bloodstream."
""Does This Go Faster?" epitomizes this sense of motion, a sunny, hazy melody with the slight queasiness of a hot car. That hungover oppression drenches the chorus: "Hell is the day after the party," West sings between observations. Breathless, she demands, "Give us the ice, give us the glass/Give us the song, give us the map/Give us a car, give us the road/Give us a raft, see if I float.""
""Even Mountains Erode" is another album standout, a percussive marriage of trip-hop and '90s-inflected pop that segues into a celestial bridge. "Night on night/Drinking poison," she reflects, before looking to the cosmos for permission to change. Change is the only constant; even mountains erode."
Heaven 2, Lala Lala's fourth album, marks a significant departure from her previous work, featuring a shift to Sub Pop and inspired by travels across multiple continents including New Mexico, Iceland, London, and Los Angeles. The album opens with existential dread about America's state, using mechanized synths to mirror the restlessness of both physical travel and mental turbulence. Songs like "Does This Go Faster?" capture the urgency and disorientation of constant movement, while "Even Mountains Erode" blends trip-hop and '90s pop to explore themes of inevitable change and transformation. Throughout the record, West examines personal and cultural decay with deadpan delivery, questioning whether recovery or escape is possible in an increasingly unstable world.
Read at Pitchfork
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]