Lykke Li has a grasp’s in unhappiness—“I’ve all the time had a damaged coronary heart since I used to be a child,” she lately stated. Her music is a companion to sorrow in the identical method the solar is a companion to the morning, and on her newest file EYEYE, the Swedish romantic continues her research in distress with complicated supercuts of tear-soaked reminiscences. Reuniting with Peter Bjorn and John’s Björn Yttling, her principal collaborator all through her first three data, Li dedicated to eight stripped-down songs in an try and “break up with the breakup album.” However within the absence of escapist melodic thrills, EYEYE serves as a sort of bloodletting for the heartache that’s nagged her all through her profession.
Loosely primarily based on the idea of a loop, EYEYE opens with the squeak of reversed tape and concludes with a jumble of vocals that recommend Li is being rewound, too. However as a substitute of maxing out her grief with entice beats and double-time supply as she did on so unhappy so attractive, or returning to the wall-of-sound manufacturing and cathartic choruses of I By no means Be taught, she turned to her cellphone. The lo-fi and unselfconscious sound of the voice memos she’d recorded appeared good, and so EYEYE was in the end recorded in her bed room, harnessing the intimate vitality of an area that’s integral to goals, sensuality, and crying in personal.
As Li thrusts us into her heavy, moody headspace, background sounds bleed into the music; crickets chirp at odd moments, and delicate white noise fills in pauses. Blurry, underwater guitars accompany her wounded supply on the primary couple songs: “And I do know I maintain on/To somebody not right here/However you received’t go away,” she sings breathily on “You Don’t Go Away,” admitting to the dissonance between misplaced love and lingering romantic emotions. As her voice ascends to a mushy soprano, the exhaustion creeps in; the whispered strategy is one way or the other louder than the enraged cry of songs like “Disappointment Is a Blessing” and “Gunshot.” However Li isn’t cultivating nostalgia for this former relationship—she’s begging the sentiments to depart. “It doesn’t go away/Each evening I pray,” she pleads.
Although these heart-in-her-hand lyrics take heart stage, the manufacturing throughout EYEYE is each entrancing and weird. The album balances mourning and meditation, filling its huge, gelatinous sound subject with phantom backing vocals, floorboard creaks, spaceship synths, and eerie, carnivalesque melodies. Halfway via the album comes one enlivening, misleadingly playful outlier: “Carousel” captures the sound of an deserted amusement park trip as Li displays on the tendency to repeatedly return to a hurtful relationship. “Flying and I can’t come down/Yeah, I’m excessive as hell,” she sings, caught on a malfunctioning trip but hoping it’d as soon as once more convey some sort of pleasure. On the outro, bioluminescent synths trickle downward like cleaning soap bubbles.
