Earlier this month, we previewed MR COBRA, the new album from Lucy Liyou forthcoming via Orange Milk Records. Liyou has described the album as “a semi-autobiographical theater-music piece,” “a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator” and “a record about shame,” and the result dances with conflicting ideas of truth and fiction, performance and authenticity. A picture of a character wrestling with their identity within a particularly vulnerable period, and one brave enough to leave all of the confusion and non-linearity of such an experience intact for all to see.
“I wanted to give myself the agency to distort all truths to see what jumped out to me as truthful in a reactive, and sometimes illusionary or misleading, sense–in all of this faulty rawness,” the San Francisco-based artist explains of the release. “I was really drawn to sounds and images that felt satisfyingly ‘false’–I was drawn to Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, my favorite drag queens in Los Angeles who magically bombed every Monday, Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment, Sunik Kim’s Potential, and so much more. I wanted frenzy that felt disembodying–so disembodying that this time of my life could conjure a laugh.”
With the album’s release quickly approaching, Lucy Liyou has returned with brand new single ‘Crisis (Identity)’. One of several hinge points within the MR COBRA narrative, the song confuses the line between crisis and epiphany, its protagonist Babygirl coming to embrace the dualism or chimeric tendencies of their character. Not quite grasping whether the admission is an exercise in masochism, liberation or both simultaneously. We follow the track from the initial clarity (such an identity is unruly, shameful, an act of performance or else a plain crisis) into something far more nuanced and interesting. That is, the realisation that perhaps any one person’s identity is too large to fully capture with any blanket label. That parts of us will always clash with others, and that contradiction is not an aberration but an inherent feature. Which means that MR COBRA does not represent the classic, affirming arc so familiar in artistic identity quests, but instead something more difficult, messy and real.
