Back in February we previewed Lucy Liyou’s upcoming full-length Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name. The album promises to be the Los Angeles musician’s “most pop-oriented to date,” but pushes beyond the conventions of up-tempo dancefloor fillers. “As ‘Arrested’ attests, Liyou’s distinctive style is far more complex than that,” we described, “possessing both a fragile minimalism and lush melodrama, the understated ethereality of the sound and poignant longing of the vocals combining into a reflective and melancholic mood. The sensation of watching a fond memory fade at the edges as the desire to return to its smallest details only grows.”
Liyou has described wanting to make the album since college, though only now possesses the skills to do the idea justice. The upshot of this is a strange duality within the songs. Liyou at 19, longing for parental acceptance as a closested trans person, and Liyou seven years later, wishing a romantic relationship might extend beyond its apparent end. “I feel really affected by this parallel between the love in wanting my parents to accept me for who I am and the love in wanting my partner to stay with me regardless of our circumstances,” they explain. “I always assumed that these two loves were separate but I think recognizing that (for trans people like me, or maybe just for me specifically) these loves have overlap has been simultaneously distressing and comforting.”
With the album’s release fast approaching on Orange Milk Records, Lucy Liyou has shared new single and opener, ’16/8′. A track which introduces both the record’s nuanced pop style and its thematic intention. To document a moment in time in all of its conflicted emotion and tactile experience. “While writing ’16/8′, I remember asking myself what does waiting for someone you love sound like, feel like?” Liyou explains:
Having played classical piano for so long, I couldn’t help but compare this feeling to rests in music—the anticipation building in the silences between notes, phrases, and ideas. I thought about the way some musicians like myself count during rests (e.g., the lyrics: “a kiss and click of the tongue”). I thought about how the growing anticipation in the rests make these silences feel substantive and material (e.g., the lyrics: “metal sheen of 16th’s and 8th’s, plexiglass and gold quarter shapes). And then it’s suddenly my turn to play. And I play what I have practiced for so long:
“please stay.
please stay.
I have so much love to give, please stay.”
