MusicReview

Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination – Music to soundtrack the clinking of cocktail glasses

Casual but confident club-friendly summery beats echo Lanza’s new home

Following a spell learning the recording processes through video tutorials, Jessy Lanza developed her signature sounds: shimmering electropop/R&B endowed with earworms
Love Hallucination
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Artist: Jessy Lanza
Genre: Electro-pop
Label: Hyperdub

Experience shows. The Canadian electronic singer, songwriter and producer Jessy Lanza spent a good part of her childhood and teenage years playing clarinet and piano (what else might you expect when your parents are musicians?) before she went to Montreal’s Concordia University to study jazz. “For a long time,” she said, “I made genreless singer-songwriter stuff” – until a friend, Jeremy Greenspan (from her fellow Canadian act Junior Boys), handed her a copy of the recording software Logic.

Following a spell learning the recording processes through video tutorials, Lanza developed her signature sounds: shimmering electropop/R&B endowed with earworms. Love Hallucination shrewdly follows her previous three albums (Pull My Hair Back, from 2012, Oh No, from 2016, and All the Time, from 2020) by gently tweaking the songs to reflect Lanza’s change of location.

Songs such as Don’t Leave Me Now, Midnight Ontario and Limbo (the album’s first batch of single releases) more or less define what comes next: casual but confident club-friendly summery beats that echo Lanza’s new home territory in Los Angeles as well as her early influences (Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, Melba Moore).

Initially incongruous but actually a perfect fit is I Hate Myself, which has Lanza continuously (and impassively) repeat the song title over synthesiser melodies that reference Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. Casino Niagara, meanwhile, is the carnal, self-regarding upside. The outcome is music that will surely soundtrack the clinking of cocktail glasses throughout the next couple of months.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Tony Clayton-Lea

Tony Clayton-Lea is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in popular culture