#love hallucination

[frgmnthtr]

Midnight Ontario (2023)

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Jessy Lanza | I Hate Myself

[luuurien]

Jessy Lanza - Love Hallucination

(Alternative R&B, Synthpop, Future Garage)

Jessy Lanza’s latest album pairs her warm, glossy production with the likes of alt-R&B, synthpop, and future garage, a mellow and breezy listen that often seems to drift into the background. Love Hallucination’s sound is undeniably solid, but it’s too laid-back to really pull you in.

☆☆☆

Jessy Lanza’s vision of clubby alt-pop is an effortlessly entrancing one. Made up of breathy Janet Jackson-indebted vocals, golden synth pads, and bouncy garage and house drum programming, her songs subtly sneak earworm hooks and playful sensuality into moody club pop, easy to have in the background but with lots to love when you put it into focus. 2020’s All The Time, along with her masterful 2021 DJ-Kicks set, further sharpened her dreamy blend of euphoric dancefloor beats with catchy retro-pop, her fourth album Love Hallucination now following their footsteps while coiling those two styles more tightly around each other. In part inspired by her move to Los Angeles, Love Hallucination is a sweet and breezy listen, making for some of her lightest and loveliest songs to date and some of her most difficult to hold onto, so airy and easy to listen to that it can feel like you’re forcing your attention on it rather than naturally being pulled into the music. Love Hallucination’s sound is undeniably solid, but it’s too laid-back to really pull you in.

At just under 38 minutes, Love Hallucination’s gentle sound can begin to drag quick, relaxing but too downbeat to carry the album all the way through. The album’s best moments are the ones where Lanza goes full-on synthpop, the chunky synth bass and bubbly vocals of Limbo an immediate highlight in the tracklist while the scattered drum programming in Big Pink Rose makes its bubblegum melody all the sweeter, but the downtempo moments can occasionally be just as exciting, particularly in the glassy keys and synth plucks of I Hate Myself and Midnight Ontario’s bustling future garage beat. Where much of the album struggles, though, is to commit to more than just the atmosphere, throwing vocal melodies in but rarely developing them into anything satisfying, Gossamer’s fuzzy beat circling around the same ideas for four minutes while the pounding four-on-the-floor opener Don’t Leave Me Now never seems to harness the urgency its production has bubbling under the surface, solid frameworks for clubby electropop lacking the push it needs to go as far as it’s always tempting to. None of these songs are bad - Lanza’s production quality and ear for interesting textures keeps them from ever getting to that point - but only a select few are particularly exciting, able to get you in Lanza’s world of chilled-out electronica with the sun shining on it and the energy mellow yet buzzing through you. More than worth taking your time with, Love Hallucination knows what it wants to do and achieves much of it, even if it comes off a bit too understated much of the time. If you’ve enjoyed her work before, you’ll enjoy it here, and for what it lacks in presence it more than makes up for in atmosphere and its select highlights. For as difficult as it can be to get a clear view of Love Hallucination, what you can see of it is wonderful to spend time with nonetheless.

[tuuneoftheday]

Jessy Lanza - Midnight Ontario

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Jessy Lanza Love Hallucination 2023

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First <- Part 18 <- Part 19 -> Part 20

Masterpost

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Pull My Hair Back (2013), Oh No (2016), All the Time (2020), Love Hallucination (2023), Jessy Lanza

Most remarkable of Jessy Lanza is, of course, her proven capacity for singular incidents of exquisiteness, but her works are also otherwise mostly solid, thus lifted by those best moments. She is perhaps now a little less fresh and full of ideas than she was a decade ago, but that’s fine; Lanza’s releases exhibit a sort of precisely produced, low-end-inclined pop that isn’t much found elsewhere.

Pick(s): ‘Keep Moving’, ‘It Means I Love You’, ‘Over and Over’, ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’

[peacheskoo]

No capes/actors AU came to me via a dream and I have since been obsessing over it,,

I have so many ideas over it but my fav is currently that the Jasons are brothers because of the quick switch between seasons/robins and how they couldn’t use the same actor for older Jason so they just asked his older brother to be Red Hood Jason, Little Jason is way younger because they were trying to emphasize how small street kid Jason was

Part 1

[mgabrielb]

Limbo

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Don’t Leave Me Now (2023)

[iamlisteningto]

Jessy Lanza’s Love Hallucination

[teethburied]

rust + hallucinations

[lunapaper]

Contrary to the song’s title, Jessy Lanza is not actually the one in limbo in the video for her latest single.  

Starring the Canadian singer/producer’s webstreamer neighbour Conrad, the song’s themes are brought to life through tight bondage, spacey club pop beats and appropriate mood lighting, turning the feeling of being trapped into something liberating. 

‘He revealed that he sometimes uses an inversion table in his webcam sessions,’ says Lanza (via Stereogum), ‘and it seemed like the perfect visualization of the themes in the song.’ 

Jessy Lanza’s forthcoming album, Love Hallucination, is out July 28. Read the review for her 2021 album, All the Time, here.  

– Bianca B. 

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Track of the day // Jessy Lanza - Limbo

From the album Love Hallucination, out July 28th on Hyperdub.