Ada Lea has announced a new EP, the end is a wave, which will arrive August 12 on Saddle Creek. The seven-track EP will follow last year’s when i paint my masterpiece, and it’s led by ‘copycat’. Check out a video for it below.
The new single’s dancey beat adds an interesting flavour to Alexandra Levy’s intimate palette, but, having recently read Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, I’m just as drawn to the subject matter. “On Friendship: In 2020, I’d just finished reading The Neapolitan Quartet (by Elena Ferrante),” Levy shared in a statement. “Lila and Lenu’s relationship felt like some of the close and maybe slightly unhealthy friendships in my life at the time. In the case of the quartet, Lenu is defined by Lila, her Brilliant Friend. Lenu is preoccupied by what Lila is doing, thinking… whom she’s loving. Lenu mythologizes her, and in so doing diminishes herself and her work. Through the four books we come to feel that Lila is truly special and Lenu is just orbiting her. Everything seems a result of some proximity to Lila. Lila was always the source, never Lenu alone. But toward the end of the quartet, there’s a shift in Lenu as she reflects back on her life with Lila. So I wrote the ‘copycat’ song about that moment.”
Reflecting on the EP, she added: “For this EP, I wanted to combine songs that were cut from when i paint my masterpiece, as well as the ones I’d recorded a million years ago when I was just a child. It was to test their fragility. How would they behave next to the other? The old and the new? The brave and the haunted? The impression and the finely sculpted. I also decided to mix three of the songs myself (was it a mistake? you tell me…I says). I’ve been thinking of the kind of artist I’d like to be, and how I’d like to see all artists treated. I am most at home when I am creating and performing, it is what I was born to do. These worlds are opposites. 12th house and 6th, 4th & 10th, the story goes on. I can imagine a future where artists are supported by UBI and they do what they want. A kind of welfare for the serious artists that are not afraid to play. It serves the betterment of society to support artists this way. I know there are others out there, like me, that feel little purpose in their life when they’re not working toward making things. But it’s also near to impossible to make things when you are fighting to protect your energy at every turn, feeling burnt out.”
