Matthew Urango, the Oxnard, CA singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who released music as Cola Boyy, has died at the age of 34. “The one and only Cola Boyy a.k.a Matthew Urango passed peacefully last Sunday,” the artist’s label, Record Makers, wrote in a statement. “He was quite a soul, a man with no age, a childlike spirit with the musicality of an old legend. His lyrics, his melodies, the sound of his voice: every side of his music was unique and timeless.”
Urango, was born with spina bifida, scoliosis, and kyphosis, played bass for the band Sea Lions before he started releasing his own music in 2018. That year, he put out his debut EP, Black Boogie Neon, which featured the singles ‘Penny Girl’ and ‘Buggy Tip’. In 2020, he made a guest appearance alongside the Clash’s Mick Jones on the Avalanches’ ‘We Go On’ from We Will Always Love You. Cola Boyy’s debut LP Prosthetic Boombox came out in 2021, boasting collaborations with the Avalanches, MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden, Godin, John Carroll Kirby, and more. As a disability-rights activist and advocate for people of color, he worked with groups including Todo Poder Al Pueblo and APOC (Anarchist People Of Color).
“Anyone who knew Matthew knows he had a larger than life personality,” Cola Boyy’s manager, Jack Sills, said on Instagram. “He was always the life of the party and could chop it up with anyone. He was also one of the most talented and down to earth people I’ve ever met. His humor and natural charisma endeared him to whoever he met. Matthew cared enormously for his family, friends and community which he often expressed through his music. He had just finished his next album and was excited to start releasing new music this summer. I will continue to work with his family and @recordmakers to make sure this happens. Love you homie. Cola Boyy Forever!”
Alena Spanger, the Brooklyn singer-songwriter who used to lead the avant-rock band Tiny Hazard, has a new single out called ‘Steady Song’. It’s set to appear on her solo debut Fire Escape, which is out on Friday and includes the previously released tracks ‘All That I Wanted’, ‘Difficult People’, and ‘Agios’. Take a listen below.
“I wanted to write a song that was simply about being okay,” Spanger explained in a statement. “It’s about restoration and exploring new, quieter pleasure, not needing to always be obliterated by feeling.”
“We look at the world once, in childhood,” Louise Glück wrote in her poem ‘Nostos’. “The rest is memory.” The quote springs to mind each time I listen to Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, which might, as its title suggests, be looking out on the road ahead, but allows itself the treasure of remembering, the freedom to linger on memories that both fade and harden with the coming of age. Lenker – lead singer of Big Thief and one of today’s most acclaimed songwriters, recording her new album in a forest-hidden studio with frequent collaborator Philip Weinrobe and friends including Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson, and Josefin Runsteen – perhaps has little reason to introduce her new record by dredging up past trauma. But in these fortunate circumstances, she finds the clarity of her senses awakened as they were when running through the woods as a child – a child who happened to be born into a cult and lived in 14 different houses before she was eight, around the time she started writing her first songs. When writing, Lenker told The New York Times, “Sometimes, I feel I have to check: Is that 10-year-old still in me?”
Not only is she there, still looking at the world and now skilled at turning it into poetry – a child “humming into the clarity of black space where stars shine like tears on the night’s face” – but the 32-year-old musician treats its presence like a gift worth sharing. “We lay around for hours, talk about childhood pain/ Mom and dad and past lives too, I can tell you anything,” she sings on ‘Free Treasure’, which is both open-hearted and open-ended, alluding to different forms of love and reserving plenty for the listener. ‘Real House’ isn’t just about the first real house her parents bought, or the pain, or “trauma” – it follows a stream of emotion that leads Lenker to the heaviest and most precious of memories, that of seeing her mother cry for the first time after their dog died, crystallizing it: a family coming together to hold the body, the way her mother held her hand at the hospital when she was fourteen. The word “needle,” threading the two memories, strikes me as a potent metaphor for her own pen: a sharp and delicate tool that can hurt but also cut through the tissue of her life, and onto others. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/ I feel a little more,” she sings on ‘Free Treasure’; song after song, Bright Future should invoke the same reaction.
Part of what makes ‘Real House’ so raw and heartwrenching is that it separates Lenker from the instrument she first picked up and that has naturally been described as an extension of her body. Hakim, whom she has known since 17, was playing the chords on piano, so she started singing along, and because the tape was always rolling, the pure magnetism of the performances is captured. It’s easy, when she sings, “I wanted so much for magic to be real,” swaying back through so, to feel her not only realizing but sharing the magic. The feeling is at the heart of ‘Sadness as a Gift’ (“You and I could see into the same eternity/ Every second brimming with a majesty”), a song that both complicates and lightens the grief documented on 2020’s masterfulsongs and instrumentals. In many of Lenker’s older songs, love was about the blood rushing, the endless tug-of-war, something to plunge headfirst into, bracing for the fall – and by throwing in a scrappy, raucous take on the Big Thief fan favourite ‘Vampire Empire’, she only underlines the album’s overall more serene yet still, naturally, revelatory and complex approach. Maturity tends love into the calm reverence exemplified by ‘No Machine’, but yearning remains wrought by contradictions, as in ‘Already Lost’: “Holding so near, standing so far/ How slow and how fast you are.”
‘Real House’ is one of three piano-driven songs that serve as the album’s emotional backbone. Closing Bright Future is ‘Ruined’, which might seem like a dour note to end on; but there’s strength, more than just resignation, in the relentless repetition of the title, the kind she feels without on the opener. In the middle is ‘Evol’, a mesmerizing song in which Lenker formalizes the theme of emotional mirrors by reversing words – “Teach, cheat/ Part, trap” – both warping and vivifying their meaning. It flows like a dream through which Lenker can ultimately see a brighter version of her truth: “You have my heart, I want it back.” It’s the present the album is always rooted in, and desire is always in it, but it bleeds into the past and future – a future that rarely looks hopeful. Lenker was seven years old when she saw the film Deep Impact, which made her think of “the whole world ending.” The thought doesn’t scare her anymore – she knows it is; that death, like a kind of magic, like a door, is no illusion, and we have little control over it. “Every person we ever love, we lose,” Lenker said in a recent interview. “We have to let go of everything, all along the way, until the very end, when you even let go of yourself and your body.” Bright Future shines because it remembers to hold and release, often in the same breath, as if it could sustain it for all eternity.
mui zyu has released ‘sparky’, the latest single off her sophomore album nothing or something to die for. Following ‘the mould’ and ‘everything to die for’, the track features lei, e (Emma Lee Moss, formerly known as Emmy the Great). Check it out via the accompanying visual, created by fellow Dama Scout member Danny Grant, below.
“sparky is a song about welcoming simple happinesses in to your world, even in the face of awfulness,” Eva Liu explained in a statement. “it also plays with different ideas of what ‘happiness’ is, and observes the strange pursuit of endlessly chasing it, often looking in the wrong places, often at your own physical and mental expense. the song is named after the dog ‘Sparky’ from the opening of David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ who is the perfect image of joyfulness – biting water from a hose in front of their dead owner.”
Today, we’re excited to present a highly acclaimed and award-winning artist hailing from China, Jiahan Fan, who presently lives in California. From a young age, Jiahan Fan’s world has been painted with the strokes of art history, beginning with a pivotal moment at 15 when she received “The Story of Art.” This book was not merely a collection of pages to her; it was a gateway to understanding the profound impact of art throughout history. Jiahan’s journey in art is deeply rooted in a blend of cultural heritage and modern influences, making her narrative a testament to the power of cross-cultural artistic exploration.
Born into a Chinese family, Jiahan’s earliest memories are tinted with the vibrant hues of traditional Chinese culture. Her fascination with color was evident from childhood, initially misleading her parents into thinking her interests lay in music, thanks to a colorful toy piano. However, it was her spontaneous wall doodles that truly revealed her passion for art. These early expressions were a precursor to a life dedicated to exploring the vast landscape of artistic creativity, nurtured by the inclusive and forward-thinking environment of her upbringing. As a member of the “post-90s” generation, Jiahan was introduced to the digital age early on, growing alongside the burgeoning internet and social media platforms, which later played a significant role in shaping her artistic perspectives.
Jiahan’s artistic philosophy underwent a significant transformation during her university years. Majoring in oil painting, she initially faced the traditional constraints of artistic expression. However, she quickly realized that true creativity knows no bounds. Her work began to challenge conventional norms, exploring themes beyond the typical still lifes and portraits, sometimes even forgoing the brush altogether. Her style became a celebration of freehand brushwork, emphasizing composition and the effective use of blank space to bring her vivid imagery to life. This approach reflects a deeper understanding that art transcends form, embodying the artist’s innermost thoughts and ideas.
The decision to further her studies at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco marked a turning point in Jiahan’s career. Immersing herself in the city’s dynamic art scene, she was particularly drawn to the allure of pop art, a genre that resonated with her nonconformist spirit. Her coursework in editorial illustration and conceptual construction allowed her to delve into the local culture, challenging her to adapt her creative expression to encompass cultural nuances. Through these experiences, Jiahan discovered the richness that comes from the fusion of different cultural elements, believing that the intersection of storytelling and aesthetics is where truly engaging art is born.
Jiahan’s acclaimed piece, “My Daily Life,” incorporates the traditional Chinese symbol of good fortune, the crane, as a central element）
In 2021, Jiahan became an artist with Ehelp Company. She actively participates in exploring and innovating in the field of digital art, using vivid lines and the clever use of illustration techniques, combined with Chinese traditional culture, to create distinctive contemporary artworks. In 2022, Jiahan collaborated with YouTuber FatDuckPoker to design a personal logo brand. Undoubtedly, Jiahan has achieved many honors along the way. “Party Animals” was selected for publication in magazines such as “VoyageLA” in 2022, “Fantasy Peking Opera” won the gold award at the 2023 MUSE Creative Awards, “My Daily Life” received the 2023 C2A and 2023 Woman In Art honorary awards, and “The Last One” won the silver award at the VEGA Creative Awards. These achievements reflect her exploration and innovation in the field of digital art gaining international recognition. Jiahan expresses that her original intention was just to create a good painting or tell a good story. Receiving honors is a pleasant surprise for her, but she is also very happy that her works are loved. “This is recognition for this stage of my journey,” she says. “I hope in the next stage I will have new breakthroughs.”
(FatDuckPoker personal logo brand)
Jiahan’s art is a dialogue between the past and the present, a journey through time and culture. As she continues to explore and innovate, her work serves as a bridge between Chinese traditions and Western modernity, offering audiences a glimpse into a world where art transcends boundaries. Jiahan Fan’s story is one of cultural synthesis, an artist who not only interprets contemporary society and culture but also envisions the future of art. In the coming year, the art world eagerly awaits the new horizons Jiahan will explore, promising more groundbreaking works that reflect her unique perspective as a cultural ambassador through art.
Shaking away the metaphysics of Tierra Whack’s fictional pseudo-documentary Cypher is no easy feat, nor does sophomore record World Wide Whack allow it. The 2023 film — during which the US artist is initiated into an Illuminati-inspired group that “consolidates power through star-making” — posits Whack as a puppet of industry to control the public. Amid cloning and mind-control conspiracies, Whack loses control of her artistry and fears replaceability in the churning pop culture machine. In “tapping into the collective anxieties of the culture,” as one review put it, Cypher’s dark jest frames World Wide Whack too. Described as her new debut — one that reintroduces Whack as a sad clown — World Wide Whack is just as focused on the conspiracy of fame as its predecessor, yet, on the contrary, its concern lies not with audiences but with Whack’s darkening state of mind under sizzling spotlight.
Largely, this re-upped debut recommits to the scaffolding of actual debut, the critically acclaimed Whack World, which features minute-long vignettes to traverse Whack’s humorously dark imagination and caricaturist vocality. Inspired by a seventeenth-century Italian black-and-white sad clown named Pierrot — a stock character perpetually stricken by romantic frustration — Whack immerses in performance, but behind the curtain, deep cracks in face-paint emerge near-immediately and abundantly, and fourth wall experimentalism undoes the artist at her seams.
Expectedly from Whack’s lyricism, World Wide Whack features dark double entendres at every turn. The disco-inspired ‘Moovies’ sees Whack saddened by a lover’s lacking efforts; Frankenstein soul across ‘Burning Brains’ addresses the dissatisfaction of a partner; and ‘X’ has Whack considering a replacement. Here, it’s fun, stylish, bold, genre-evasive and enthralling. But in switching to Pierrot’s point-of-view these relationships appear solely parasocial, traversing instead the matrix of fame. Isolated by stardom, Pierrot-Whack is “balling on [her] lonely”, begins to treat “fans like homies,” and becomes disillusioned by adoration. On ‘Imaginary Friends’, she sings: “When nobody cared, you cared for me/They say you’re a conspiracy.”
Struggling with mental health, suicidal ideation fast becomes World Wide Whack’s red thread, an aching at the heart of the performance to both contrast and uphold sad clown whimsy. “When I grow up I want to hang from a ceiling,” she sings on ‘Imaginary Friends’. Plentiful onstage cries further darken the record: she reaches the “final stage of being numb” on ‘Numb’, and in nearing her end, spews manic depressive, near-conspiratorial sentiment on ‘Two Night’: “It’s not my fault that this is the end […] prepare for when I go missing […] death is real, life is fake.” Familiar comedic clownery and wit remains, and no track is ever anything less than entertaining, as if she’s prioritizing the show: “Before I go, I want to let you know/ I didn’t pay the light bill this month.” To close the curtain, ‘27 Club’ confesses the hardship of accolade: amid such renown she’s lost joy in the performance and holds her life and artistry at ransom — “I can show you how it feels when you lose what you love […] Looking for something to commit to/ Suicide,” she sings, dancing in clown attire and smiling maniacally — leaving audience suspended in awe, unease and applause. Separated by eerie piano interludes, the fifteen tracks of World Wide Whack showcase a darkly layered and emotional narrative on chronic depression — contrasted only by its near-constantly innovative off-piste R&B — and such depressive realism and intellectual commentary lends itself to Whack’s cartoonish fourth wall experimentalism. Ultimately, World Wide Whack becomes the sort of record that cements artistic vision and legacy.
The irony lies in the applause itself, of course, which fuels the parasocial transactionality between clown and patron, a sentiment shared by Bo Burnham’s Inside. Doubly, perhaps — particularly under the lens of scripted docufilm Cypher, with all its fictionalised music industry horrors — Whack posits World Wide Whack as a red-pilling of the unsettling reality of artistry. But there’s reluctance to interpret too much, and in Cypher she observes: “People find what they want when they’re looking for something. When they want something to be real, then all they see are connections.” Yet World Wide Whack — an effective parable and cleverly constructed record that, sensitively, makes a clownery of depression — undeniably stares into the abyss of fame, and as Whack returns to her vibrant visual fantasy, there’s a sense that, between all the heartache and horror, she seeks agency and connection, even as a clown-for-hire in an all-consuming, disorienting industry. “I had this strange feeling my story wasn’t mine anymore,” she concludes amid snowballing fame in Cypher, “like I had lost my hold on it.”
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have Vampire Weekend’s Classical’, which combines the familiar whimsy of the band’s best work with bleak commentary and a great hook; Myriam Gendron’s strikingly emotional and honest ‘Long Way Home’, which the singer-songwriter calls, in a way, her “first pop song”; ‘365’, another poignant preview of Waxahatchee’s new album; Drahla’s ‘Grief in Phantasia’, the knotty and captivating closer of the band’s new album; ‘Imaginary Friends’, a darkly honest and beautiful highlight off Tierra Whack’s new album; Ride’s driving new song ‘Monaco’; and ‘Enough for You’, the entrancing first single from shoegaze artist Wisp’s debut EP Pandora.
At a fellowship where Australian-born Malaysian Girl, a scholar on Sylvia Plath, is ferried to Scotland to write a postcolonial novel and a dissertation, she has trouble doing either. Followed by memories of her parents growing up and their tough love, Girl feels like examining Plath’s work isn’t true to her, and starts a novel based on her family history. Things blow up later when Girl shares her work to the group, and differences between her and her white counterparts become too loud to ignore. She enjoys herself, briefly, at a postcolonial conference where she starts to reckon with the fact of pursuing academia, but after a family emergency, her desires are tied and she becomes unsure of what to do. Honest, tender, and very funny, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel is a must-read for academics or anyone looking at life differently.
We sat down with Yu to chat about academia, autofiction, and writer’s guilt.
Congratulations on your debut novel! It’s already out in the UK and Australia, how are you feeling going into its US publication?
Excited! It’s an honor to be published in multiple territories — I’ve already had some really amazing reader feedback and it’s been great.
But the Girl is a semi-autofictional tale about a writer in Scotland abroad to work on a dissertation and a novel; how much of it was taken from your life and how much was fiction, and how did you balance the two?
I always say to people that writers write from life, that’s a given, but I’d give it a 30/70 — 30% taken from life and my own experiences and observations, 70% fictionalized and made into the coherent structure of a novel, which is really hard to do.
Girl always feels ‘on’ when she interacts with any of the fellowship staff, and it’s interesting to hear the thoughts passing through her mind, like, ‘Now I must smile to show gratitude, because I am receiving this huge opportunity.’ Where do you think this hesitancy and disconnect comes from?
One thing that really influenced this novel was at the time I was working on a dissertation on the representation of the Asian diaspora in Western media and screen texts. Have you listened to the new Olivia Rodrigo album?
Yes!
That song [“all-american bitch”] that says, “I’m grateful all the time, I’m sexy and I’m kind,” I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s a great musical interpretation of fetishizing and feminizing the Asian diaspora way of presenting in the world,’ feeling, not safe, I guess. The way I keep myself safe is I project these qualities that are seen as a positive version of me, with that model minority stuff. That’s mixed in with the sense of being a female Asian body in the world, how that presents, what that means to people and how they code and understand it. Thinking of how racialized bodies are either a threat or subjugating, so it’s about subjugating yourself in order to avoid becoming a threat or threatened.
I totally empathize with Girl’s worries of productivity — she feels guilty when she works on her PhD, because her fellowship is for her novel, and she feels guilty when she works on her novel, because she feels her PhD is much more of a distinguished accomplishment. Why do you think she can’t get out of her head and go wherever the writing and creativity takes her?
I think the weirdest thing about writing is that it does live there, in your head. I know you literally have to type or write something down, and that’s a physical act, but I feel like it’s one of the least physical art forms. One of my best friends is a painter, a visual artist, and I feel like that must be such an interesting experience, for your art form to be cerebral and physical, a form of labor. I feel like writing is a form of labor but you’re sitting there, putting things from inside your brain onto a computer or a piece of paper. I think that’s what trips a lot of writers up — you’re already so inside of your head doing your practice, it’s easy to get more inside your head about your anxieties and fears and worries about [it].
I’m obsessed with the fact that Girl chooses to do a thesis regarding the postcolonial because, she says, it sounds ‘theoretical’ and ‘impressive.’ I had a good time with how she noticed the absurdity of academia, analyzing just to do it — was this something you wanted to incorporate in the book?
I’m an academic, and I work at a university now, and even as a PhD student, it’s almost like you’re getting indoctrinated into the ways of academia. I’ve had to think a lot about that and read a lot about that in order to understand what was happening to me at the time. Which I’ve made sound really grim in the novel! There’s obviously some really beautiful things about academia as well. But there are really absurd and funny and tragic and sad things about it. I wanted to write about that because I think part of the novel is Girl is embodying the dream of the immigrant family. Her dad believes academia to be this really utopic place, where she can just write her silly little books and make a living wage, and have that privileged life. But there are so many difficult things about that privileged life, and I wanted to talk about that tension. I dunno, there’s always a tension there between immigrant parents and their kids. The question: ‘is your life more hard than mine or is my life more hard than yours?’ is always being asked. Girl’s had this really privileged life as a second-generation immigrant, and the book is about finding ways to hold space for both the difficulties of her parents and herself. Which is something that Girl really struggles with.
Did you write the novel while you were doing your PhD?
In Australia, it’s quite common to have creative writing programs where you can do PhDs with split dissertations — half of it is a critical, traditional academic thesis, and the other half is a novel, or short story collection or play. I was trying to write my novel as part of my dissertation but the form that it took — the way you see it now is so different. I was so self-conscious about being in academia and not wanting it to be this academic, PhD novel that I tried to write this dishonest novel that felt really guileless. But then in the redrafting phase, I was like, ‘But I’m learning all this stuff now, and maybe I know too much, but I want the book to be overfilling with the sense of knowing too much and inhibiting you.’ It sort of became the academic novel I was afraid of writing as a PhD student and leant event harder into that. I felt it was more honest in some ways, because that was my experience and I wanted the book to know as much as I did, not be this “unknowing” piece of work.
Girl is connected to another student in the fellowship, Clementine, a painter who somewhat selfishly has Girl sit for a portrait, which keeps her from her own work. They have tiffs about the nature of art and how to be a person — what did you want to explore with this relationship?
I did an artist residency when I was a PhD student and I felt such a charged energy — it was supposed to be communal where we had all these common goals and we were at this beautiful place, but it was so charged with the anxiety of being an artist and the feeling that you’re fighting for scraps. What is even the prize at the end of this? Probably nothing! And yet, you have so much competitive desire. It was a way of exploring the mimetic desire artists feel inside this one relationship.
Girl and Clementine don’t really see each other, even though Clementine is drawing Girl, and Girl is thinking about Clementine. They’re both misunderstanding each other and using each other in different ways, and that’s something that happens in the Plath novel, and something I wanted to explore — that sense of misseeing someone when you’re so consumed with anxiety. There’s competition, envy, and also racism. I wanted to explore how that works. It was also a manifestation of the way Girl sees Plath, and how she objectifies her, seeing her as an object she can project all these things onto. It’s this triangle, in some way, between these three figures — Plath, Clementine, and Girl.
There’s a book within the book, Pillar of Salt, a family history that Girl writes instead of her postcolonial novel or Plath dissertation. When she showcases parts of the book to the group, all they can comment on is how diverse voices are needed, not anything actually regarding the book. Girl, rightly so, points this out, after she’s suffered microaggressions and odd comments during her whole stay. Is this instance in particular painful to her because it pertains to her writing?
I think it’s painful because I feel like a lot of girls in the Asian diaspora — I don’t want to generalize — but for me, you have all this pent-up anger you can’t really express because it’s not safe to do so in public. Sometimes it just wells up and explodes. Girl has been on the brink of expressing these things for the entire novel and the climax is when she finally does. I also think artists are pretty protective about their work. It’s like, “insult me and hate me all you want, but insult my work…” They can be quite sensitive about it. For Girl, it feels like such a violation of her work to see it as this thing and commodity, even though when you publish a book it does, of course, become a commodity. The book is still in its nascent state at the time of the residency and she’s making something that’s really important to her. For people to only be able to see it as a “thing”… it just feels so awful to her.
Girl is born in Australia the day her parents immigrate to the country, granting her automatic citizenship. Her upbringing with her family is tough but loving, and throughout the novel, she constantly has flashbacks. Do you think these expectations her parents place on her, that she’s abroad, getting money to work, have an effect on her?
I think her parents’ expectation is that she’s successful in a broader sense — I don’t think they’re into the finer details of her practice or what her work means to her. They don’t really understand that part of her, but what they understand is that they want her to be happy and well, and to be able to achieve the things she wants to achieve. For Girl, there’s a sense that it’s really hard to guarantee that will happen, as an artist or writer, it’s such a scary thing putting the instability of that chosen path together with that very immigrant desire for stability which causes this very anxious mess inside of her.
Finally, you’re working on an upcoming essay collection, All the Stain is Tender — what are some of the topics you’re exploring there?
The way I think of it, you can’t really talk about what it means to inhabit a racialized, feminized body in the world like you’re pinning a butterfly to a piece of card. It’s more elusive than that in some ways, and there are feelings you have without any sort of evidence to back them up, or any proof — they just well up inside you in weird ways. What I’m trying to do with that essay collection is to find an “uncontainer” or non-constraining form in order to somewhat collect those feelings and put them on the page. That’s sort of the overarching theme of the book.
One of the essays I just wrote was a craft essay, about writing so-called ‘immigrant fiction.’ There’s so many tropes and clichés you can commodify and feel really gross. For example, the way food is exoticized and made a centerpiece in immigrant fiction, but, like, what if food is really important for you, or that is a genuine part of your culture? I guess it’s an essay about wrestling with what happens when things you genuinely love or connect you to yourself become commodified — how do you write about them or express them in ways that feel right?
I’ve also been working, for ages, about this essay on Taylor [Swift]. The idea that she’s, like, this image of perfected young womanhood. She’s everything, she’s it.
Writer-director Rose Glass is proving herself to be one of the most exciting and vibrant voices in genre filmmaking. After flipping the conventions of horror in Saint Maud, she sets her sights on the erotic crime thrillers of the 1980s with Love Lies Bleeding. With her sophomore effort she brings forth a spirited and guttural examination of the ugliest, rawest, and most beautiful parts of feminine desire. Its devilishly campy take on a lesbian romance is destined for cult status, delivering a mesmerizing cast, killer synth soundtrack by Chris Mansell, and some of the goriest kills this side of David Cronenberg.
Set in an almost mythic 1989, amidst the neon-drenched deserts of New Mexico, Love Lies Bleeding opens on Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager who’s always stuck cleaning someone else’s mess. Lou feels trapped in her humdrum town, where her life revolves around protecting her sister Beth (Jenna Malone) from her abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco), and avoiding a lovelorn fling with Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov). To make matters worse, she’s finds herself a key piece in an FBI Investigation targeting her estranged king-pin father (Ed Harris). He’s part of a past life she claims to have distanced herself from.
The arrival of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifting bodybuilder vying to make it big at a Las Vegas competition, signals the start of a new chapter in Lou’s life. After a night of sex and steroids, the two become inextricably linked to each other. Their scintillating, almost intoxicating romance is arguably the film’s greatest element, often placing us on a knife’s edge between pleasure and pain. In many ways they’re emblematic of Hollywood’s greatest (and most dangerous) couples, exuding raw passion with each gaze, embrace, and spirited argument. Through its sheer carnality, their romance becomes a progressive treatise on female desire itself, finding power in the grime and scuzz.
Yet, their dreamlike affair turns bitter when Jackie commits a brutal crime of passion, trapping the two in a downward spiral of violence and substance abuse they struggle to escape. The more they try to wriggle out of their bind, the more they are forced to confront their dark pasts.
Love Lies Bleeding. Credit: VVS FILMS
O’Brian cements herself as a star in the making, relishing a performance of rare physicality and vulnerability. Her buffed-out figure is home to a vein-popping, blood-churning transformation, capturing a character so unhinged it becomes impossible to look away—even in the most uncomfortable and disturbing of moments. Yet, despite how deranged her character becomes, O’Brian never forgets to imbue her with a human edge.
A never-better Stewart embodies both the femme and the fatale of Love Lies Bleeding, breathing life into a character who is as strong as she is flawed. Her take on Lou manifests as a stirring critique of “strong female characters”, where her shortcomings and missteps become her most admirable and triumphant qualities. In embracing her imperfections, Stewart lays bare a new, daring approach to femininity. Ed Harris also shines in a wild, imposing turn as the film’s chief antagonist, chewing the scenery—and a bug at one point— as a man desperately clinging to his rotting criminal empire.
Glass shoots Love Lies Bleeding with a distinctive eye, armed with a visual dexterity that mirrors the heart and brutality of its surreal world. Coupled with its abrasive editing, often drenching certain sequences in a nightmarish neon red, the film begins to emulate the very high of its protagonists’ lurid headspace. Love Lies Bleeding injects itself into us like the very steroids Lou and Jackie use, coursing through our veins and compelling us to hallucinate along with them. An effect that can become a bit too dizzying as it glides towards its cataclysmic conclusion.
Love Lies Bleeding takes wild swings that don’t always land, but when they do, Glass’ second outing fires on all cylinders—like a roaring transgressive machine. An especially bizarre climax may jump the shark for some viewers, it never betrays its sincere and campy heart. This commitment to such carnal oddity is key to its ravishing power, giving us the type of doomed romance that is rarely, if ever, matched.
