I’m gonna cut to the chase here and say A6 is easily one of Lights’ best albums. There is so much adventurousness in this album, so much musicality, so much commitment to growing and developing artistically. I haven’t been so thoroughly delighted by a new album from one of my favorite artists since To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar back in 2015.
Lights is an artist who has never repeated herself, diving into a new sound with each album she’s released. It’s one of the traits I appreciate most in an artist, and it’s why she’s my favorite artist. As an artist myself, I’ve always gravitated towards working with entirely new sounds on each project, and I can easily attribute that tendency of mine to the role Lights’ music has played in my life since I was a teenager. A6 is no exception to this trend, it has a darker and more brooding sound than any of her work thus far. The synthpop of her early career largely takes a backseat here, giving way to a new blend of post-punk, synthwave, and emo, showing us a whole new side of Lights’ sonic repertoire.
However, it’s not just the change in sound that makes me look at A6 as such a triumph of artistic growth, but also the thematic and lyrical shifts. This album sounds like the culmination of a long and arduous process of personal growth, of sifting through trauma and attempting to pull a stronger self out from underneath it all.
Over the past six months, I’ve been writing a lot about Lights’ music, trying to pour almost 15 years’ worth of thoughts and emotions I’ve had regarding her music into these retrospective odes to the uniqueness of her artistic career. I’ve already published my writings on The Listening and Siberia, two albums I’ve held very close to me ever since I first heard them in high school, and I was in the process of writing about Little Machines when A6 released.
A6 and Little Machines actually share a very special commonality for me. Little Machines was the first Lights album where I was actively following the roll-out: piecing together all the little teasers and countdowns and trailers, the promo singles and artwork and tracklist announcements, and discussing with all the other fans on the IAmLights message boards. And if you’ve read my pieces on The Listening and Siberia linked above, I mentioned how due to my own personal struggles with mental health, I kind of just stopped keeping up with music and most of my hobbies around 2017, up until the end of 2024. So, after missing out on the Skin & Earth and Pep cycles, A6 is now the first album since Little Machines where I’ve been properly following the roll-out, anticipating the album, and chopping it up with folks, now on the subreddit and the discord channels. Getting to be part of that kind of experience again has been a lot of fun for sure, especially discussing each promo single, each teaser, and speculating on what the album will be like. I only listened to each promo single once when it dropped, because I wanted to keep those songs fresh for when I could hear them amidst their proper context in the album.
Now that the album is out, I can say it was 100% worth the wait. I love this album so much, from all the driving surges of instrumentation and catharsis to the little touches and nuances sprinkled throughout. I’ve always been one to curtail my recency bias, being very careful to let a project sit and digest before forming my thoughts around it, but I couldn’t wait with A6. From the first two listens on release date, I knew this album was special, and I immediately wanted to place it among my favorite Lights albums. For that reason, I sidelined the Little Machines review temporarily so I could jump right into A6, partly so I could get all these feelings out unfiltered while the album is hot off the presses, and partly so I could share this review with Lights and her fans while we’re all still taking in the album and tour.
This is album is noteworthy to me especially because of the journey of a career that has preceded it, and for that reason, I will be talking a lot about how this album is different from her previous work and how it builds upon it. With that in mind, I’d definitely suggest reading those previous retrospectives I linked above as I’ll be referring to them as I trace the shifts and developments this album represents.
So that’s the overview, you already know I like this album a lot, but now let’s dive in so I can explain in detail (and in elation!) just what makes this album stand out among her discography. Just a heads up, you’ll probably see me writing several paragraphs digging into what amounts to 15 seconds of music, several times throughout this review lol. This album means a lot to me as a long-time fan of Lights and I want to put my effort forth in sharing everything I see in it with everyone who wants to read this. So, I will not leave anything left unsaid for the sake of brevity.
A Narrative Beginning
From the start, A6 is among Lights’ most thematically focused albums to date. I immediately sense intent, and the album appears very methodically sequenced.
I’d highly recommend watching the visualizers she’s released for the full album as I feel they complement the songs so aptly.
We start with the intro, a brief snippet of environmental noises, chatter, and a person talking about waking up each day to give music to the people, all dispersed over a montage of Lights in different stages of her career. Finally, we hear Lights say: “Welcome to A6”.
I really like this intro, for several reasons.
The first is that I’ve just always loved skits, environmental noise, or human chatter in songs. Rap music does this very often, but it’s rare in pop music, and even rarer in Lights’ music. This kind of ambience has a strong allure to me — it removes art from being framed as this thing that exists within a glass case to be examined by the viewer, and instead makes it feel more like something created by a person living in the world, interacting with people around them. Beauty, in my opinion, is something to be sought in the most regular of life’s moments, not something to be occasionally gazed at in some controlled, intentional location. I like when art is able to capture its environment in this way.
The second reason is historical: I feel like this intro conjures some of the energy of those vlogs and livestreams Lights used to do back in the day, directly interacting with fans and playing alternative versions of songs. I wrote about that more in my retrospective on The Listening, but I’m sure long-time Lights fans get what I’m talking about here. Lights hasn’t ever really addressed the audience directly in her music, so it’s a bit of a unique moment here where she is directly welcoming the audience into this album, almost like at a concert. We’ve all grown up a lot since those vlog days, Lights included, so I just felt this aspect of the intro was warm and nostalgic.
This plays into my third reason why I appreciate the intro, the strongest reason: I feel we are getting a new openness on A6, a Lights that is being more forthcoming in her music, and in turn, music that is more directly representative of her. The visualizer has clips from her personal life, traveling, in the studio, and in nature. Where previous music videos were pretty traditional, giving us some interesting cinematography, set-pieces, or concepts, this one seems more barebones, instead just sharing some slice-of-life moments. This, in addition to her directly addressing the audience, sets this album up as more transparent, more personal. It feels less like a performance we are watching and more like a direct conversation. At the same time, the visualizer is a montage of her over the years, giving this sense of reflecting on moments from the past, and how they lead us to where we are now, and where we’re going. Here’s where we were, and now, welcome to the next step.
So now let’s move on to the first song: “Damage”.
“Damage” showcases the new sound, drawing from the goth, post-punk and new wave of the 80s, plus a smidge of Midwest Emo and synth. To me, this is a perfect sonic palette for this album, scoring the digging-through-trauma essence of the lyrical messaging with a darker, more visceral sound.
I previously wrote about how The Listening felt like a hymn for the over-thinkers; I think this album deals with what happens when all that anxiety, guilt, and repression that comes from overthinking simmers up and bubbles over into real damage, real trauma. We have to make so many decisions in life, often trying to appease or satisfy others’ expectations of who we should be, that we end up sacrificing so much of ourselves in the process. I think in “Damage” we see a distillation of the album’s overarching desire to cut open these wounds and stitches and extract that writhing, festering gunk that has accumulated over a lifetime of trauma, so that we can clear it out and find our genuine identities hidden underneath. The video has her frantically cutting her hair off in chunks, her hair getting shorter and more tattered as the song crescendos. And in that crescendo, a new, visceral vocal delivery, with her literally screaming in the background vocals, voice cracking and veering towards collapse.
I’m really moved by the vocals on this song, and the album in general. She’s trying so many new things, and nailing them, tastefully arranging these wrenching, visceral screams amidst the multi-layered melodic tapestries of these songs. There’s an edge throughout this album that wasn’t really present in much of her previous work, and I think these screaming, cracking vocals in “Damage” serve that to us up front, cutting their way through the fibers of the song.
There is also a shift in lyricism to accompany this shift in sound and voice; I wrote in my other retrospectives how my absolute favorite aspect of Lights’ writing is the abstract, fantastical nature of her lyrics. Lines from previous albums like “It’s around me, in my surroundings / It counts me, when it starts the counting / In the chaos, there is a standard / I’m carrying it, like a banner” or “It really just depends on who’s giving and who’s receiving / And things that don’t make sense are always a little deceiving” feel so elevated above the mundanities of everyday life, carrying this poetic gravity to them that leaves me wondering just what real-life scenario these lines could pertain to. The abstraction and metaphor make each lyric feel like a cipher I’m trying to decode.
But since Pep, her writing has been less abstruse and more direct, less abstract and more personal. Though I love the poetic abstraction, this new style is just as intentional and focused. With the theming of the album being about these cycles of unearthing trauma and finding ourselves underneath, I think the writing style here is fittingly uninterested with filtering these feelings through some intellectualization or purple prose, instead baring these emotions as immediately as they present themselves. It reminds of the song “The Listening”, which I praised as having this impressionistic quality of conveying emotions exactly as they are felt, truly putting us in the mind of someone having these feelings of anxiety rather than trying to describe anxiety in the most coherent or elegant way. I get the same effect from the lyrics on this album. Deep-seated emotions are ugly and disorganized, and I think this more direct writing style she employs here refrains from polishing away the rawness of those feelings.
We have seen the album start off with brief reflection, then a self-destructive but cathartic mental breakdown. I mentioned how the song represents to me this process of cutting deep into our emotional pain and uncovering our true self in the process; I think the video parallels this same process — after she has frenetically cut off most of her hair, we are finally left with the short, gray hair that is now emblematic of her new self and her new A6 era. At the end of destruction, a rebirth.
“Alive Again” finds itself squarely in this phoenix-like rebirth, and as the title suggests, it describes a longing and hope that we can truly live a free-er life on the other side of that battle. The song is much more light-hearted, but the chugging post-punk bassline keeps it in tune with the album’s sound. The hook waxes jubilantly about letting it all go, enjoying the present moment and just having some fun without thinking too much. Feeling alive again.
The video also gives us the first dose of this found-footage horror and cultish aesthetic of A6, taking place in the woods at night like some pop-punk satanic ritual. But I love how cute and goofy the ghosts look! It reminds me of the DIY arts-and-crafts vibe of the videos from The Listening, which felt like those fun little projects we’d do with friends as kids, making costumes and sets and fake weapons and what not from cardboard, paper, and Elmer’s glue.
Throughout this album, Lights is somehow threading the needle with being able to present an entirely new sound and aesthetic for herself, new writing styles and messages, while still capturing these glints of her previous work and past musical selves. It’s hard for me to summarize this album because it at once sounds like a rejection and an embrace of the past. I think that’s a core takeaway from this album thematically; we don’t grow as people by ditching who we used to be but by continuously integrating our existing strengths with all these new avenues of growth that are available to us. This becomes clearer as the album progresses, I feel.
And where I talked about The Listening being about overthinking and breaking free from that, “Alive Again” directly touches on that sentiment in the bridge:
I think I've been overcomplicating everything,
I just wanna feel alive again
Alive again
I enjoy seeing these themes from earlier projects being developed on in later projects, it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been tracing them through her whole discography. Contrasting The Listening though, her voice has this punk-ish rasp to it when singing the hook, which is very fresh after her softer, dulcet tones on earlier albums.
“Surface Tension” is next, and it’s honestly my favorite of all the promotional singles. Ever since “Lucky Ones”, I’ve been fiending for more low-register Lights vocals. She has such a good voice for that 80s synthpop sound, where a lot of those singers would pair the high energy synths with deeper vocal deliveries. “Surface Tension” finally gives me a full song of that!
Not to mention how it also continues that trend of Lights songs that sound like pop music straight out of the future. I said this about “Suspension” and “Fourth Dimension” from Siberia, but man, this one sounds like it’s right out of Blade Runner or Cyberpunk. The neon lights, the shimmering synth-wave, that driving bass: I can’t get enough of it. It’s stylish, it’s sleek, it’s dope.
And as I’ve been saying, the lyrics fit so cohesively with the themes of the album. Throughout the first verse, there’s more of that sardonic cynicism we heard on “Damage”: one of the reasons I consider this album as being so much more transparent is how, where The Listening and Little Machines were relatively more wide-eyed and good-natured, A6 is unafraid to be pessimistic and abrasive in tone. Not only does she swear quite a bit more than she used to, the lyrics are pretty misanthropic in how they seek to push away friends, love, and concerns for one’s own health:
What is my doctor gonna say
When he finds out I been up all night every day?
It probably wouldn't matter anyway
It probably wouldn't matter anyway
How's it feel when it falls out of focus?
How's it feel when nobody even noticed?
Fuck love, fuck friends, fuck the showbiz
Seven plagues coming down like locusts
I do however get the feeling that this acridity, while expressed openly, is still presented as something to push past in order to be happy. I think the song frames this negativity as a state of being a person is trying to break out of. Consider the hook:
Surface tension
You know I love you, dear
But I can't even look in the mirror
Everybody's toxic
Everybody talks shit
You know I love you, dear
But I, I gotta get out of here
It portrays this situation of lingering in negativity, and feeling this desire to remove ourselves from it all, even if that means isolating from people we love. I take “I gotta get out of here” to mean knowing that we will need to break out of these negative feedback cycles if we want to grow into a stronger and happier person.
Continuing that thought, I view the title of the song as referring to something on the verge of breaking through a surface and into a new realm, like a whale breaching by pushing against that surface tension of the water until it finally surges through. I interpret this as a metaphor for being on the precipice of living a truer, more liberated life. Fighting through repressive tendencies, making enough progress that you can see the light on the other side of that water’s surface, only needing to make that final push before you can emerge into a new era of being your genuine self.
Taking a step back from the meanings of lyrics and more towards songwriting…how dynamic are these songs?! I’ve always praised Lights for being able to inject these melodic shifts in her songs, seemingly being one of the last artists still fighting the good fight of keeping bridges alive in pop music. She’s always been great at these change-ups, but on A6 it’s like she’s gone super Saiyan with it haha.
“Damage” had this lush instrumental switch-up at that part in the second verse where she sings “And when I get home, gonna lay there awake / Tryna figure out how not to make a mistake“, which adds such a beautiful, melodic respite to a song that’s otherwise brooding and distressed. And that bridge on “Alive Again” is arguably my favorite part of the song — I literally only listened to it once before the album released and somehow it was stuck in my head for the whole month. And here, in “Surface Tension”, she starts singing in German? Excuse me?! I don’t speak German but this bridge is so catchy, and again, SO evocative of the German goth and new-wave that the project draws from.
SYNTHesis
There are quite a few noticeable shifts in tone and sound in the next chunk of the album.
Starting with “You’re Killing Me”, it feels like a step away from the darkness and post-punk we’ve seen so far, and instead incorporates more midwest emo, and some sprawling post-rock tinges. The former sound has a lot of influence in this album, while the latter has been present even before, like on “Beside Myself” from Pep. These are genres I enjoy a lot, so it’s awesome that Lights is dipping into those spaces more these days. I can hear notes of Alvvays in the opening of this song, and The War On Drugs in the instrumentation throughout, all filtered through that unique blend of pop and poetry that Lights brings to the table. This is great.
I note also how this song and “White Paper Palm Trees” have her going back to her higher register and incorporating some lighter synths. It’s in the confluence of the newer sounds with her higher singing and synth melodies that this middle portion of A6 becomes such a seamless synthesis of the twinkly pop of The Listening with the more mature alternative rock sound she has crafted on this album.
It’s no coincidence either, there’s a direct callback to “February Air” in “White Paper Palm Trees”, and the way she sings the pre-chorus is so reminiscent of that distinctly breathy singing style she had back on her debut album. What I’m particular drawn to is how while this pre-chorus sounds very “old Lights”, it immediately shifts back into a very post-rock, post-punk sound as the hook comes in. Combined with the lyrics about how she’s “not the same as who [she] was at the time”, I always interpret this musical moment as a throwback cut off by immediately pulling us back into the present, a kind of bait-and-switch. It continues that delicate balancing of a new era with a contiguous integration with and appreciation for the past that led there.
And yo, “Ghost Girl on First”! This feels like an instant pop-emo classic. From the very first notes, it feels so timeless, so flawless. Down to the VHS filter on the visualizer, I feel instantly taken back to the early 2000s emo scene, like American Football and Brand New got dropped into 2025. This song just feels like the hot sun beating down, pulling all these emotions out. I can’t help but feel moved by how passionate the vocals sound on this one, there’s such a direness to her delivery. The whole second half of this song is just one brilliant moment after the other:
- All the backing vocals that are melting into each other in the second hook
- The slow transition from the hook into the instrumental interlude before the bridge
- The bridge itself feels so memorable with those shouted vocals and the reverb-heavy mixing
- The way the energy of the bridge slowly dissipates back into the “I watched, you gooooo” in the final hook.
#3 is something I want to dig into more here. When re-listening to Little Machines recently for my retrospective, something I really loved about it was how Lights’ vocals were mixed on songs like “Speeding”, “Oil And Water”, and “From All Sides”. Drenching her voice in this palpable reverb gave those songs a strong sense of atmosphere and place, feeling like those songs were being sung not in a studio but in a desert, in a car, or at a concert. I thought at the time, “Wow, Lights sounds SO good with her vocals produced this way”, and I wanted more. This album is delivering that to me in spades, and “Ghost Girl on First” especially stands out as a perfect execution of this mixing style.
And that’s one instance of a trend I see throughout A6: I feel like for every single time in the past where I heard Lights do something interesting for a few seconds in a song and thought “Damn, I wish I could hear more of this particular thing”, she’s delivered on A6 fleshed-out expansions of those moments into full songs. So far, we’ve seen the lower register singing and the reverb-heavy vocal mixing I love getting a lot of airtime here, and the next song elaborates on yet another one of those flourishes.
“Take It Easy” is one of my favorite songs on this album, and the centerpiece of this middle bit of the project to me. It’s refreshingly simple and soft, and has some of the sweetest vocals on the album. Especially when she sings the title, it’s really pleasant and soothing.
I’ve mentioned how backing vocals steal the show on this album, and you can hear that so prevalently here. There was this magical little sequence back in “Heavy Rope” on Siberia where the many different vocal tracks all overlap and form this ethereal collage of melodies, with one particularly beautiful backing vocal shining through towards the end. To this day, it’s one of my favorite musical moments, and my longing to hear a development on that is finally sated by “Take It Easy”. There are so many layers and variations of vocals here, from the soft whispering, the screaming at the end, and the many melodies and counter-melodies, to the minimalist bridge where it’s this stripped-down melange of isolated vocals weaving into each other. The vocal arrangements alone give this song so much replay value, I feel I’d love this even if there were no lyrics and just vocalizations haha. This is one of the songs that I’ll be listening to the most outside of full-album listens.
I think the visualizer is really clever because having the two Lights-es singing different parts of the song at the same time helps to highlight all these different vocal layers that are playing off of each other. Sometimes when just listening to a song we can tend to fixate on one part and miss the others, so having a video that visually draws attention to the different components is an easy but effective way to showcase them to the listener.
While the “take it easy” in the hook and the overall aesthetic of the song feel lighter, the lyrics feel bitingly resentful and fed up, recounting what appears to be a relationship where it seems like effort is not being reciprocated, or that problems are not being taken seriously by the other person. This person is coming and going as they please, so the “take it easy” reads less like a genuine suggestion and more like a remark sarcastically encouraging the person to continue with their disinterested and uncaring behavior.
Broadly, this middle chunk stands as an interesting complement to the start and end of the album, in that while it is aesthetically lighter and tonally less brooding, these songs are still speaking about negative experiences, whether it’s heartbreak, unhealthy relationships, or dealing with toxic behaviors. If we return to the narrative structure I mentioned in the first segment, this is a meaningful progression. “Damage” felt unstable and chaotic in its emotional urgency, capturing those moments where all the pain and trauma from the past hits at once, leading into a frenzied spiral. “Alive Again” and “Surface Tension” both express a desire to break through that turmoil or depression and find a better way to live on the other side. Put together, that first segment centers around cycles of repression and pessimism that a person would need to break out of if they want to live a more honest, productive life. This is where I feel this second segment continues the story: it now feels like a healthier person, reflecting on painful memories and feeling those emotions in earnest, without repression and without guilt. Looking back on mistakes and negative life events with sympathy and strength means we can learn from and appreciate them, painful as they were, without once again succumbing to the trauma they carry.
Where the previous songs mashed lighter sounds with darker content, the next two songs finally give us levity in both aspects. “Drinks On The Coast” gives us breezy, warm instrumentation. I think the song and visualizer inject some much-appreciated chillness and humor to the album, with how moody the rest of it can be. I personally love the moody and caustic sensibilities of the album, but this song fits the summertime release of this project.
“Clingy” is this album at it’s poppiest, and it’s fantastic. And hey, it is SO great to hear an electric guitar featuring so prominently in a pop hook these days. I feel like I’ve been walking through a desert and I’m finally seeing water haha. I’m a rock and metal fan and I’ve always been confused, do pop fans not think electric guitars sound dope?? This song is awesome. The way the song drops into a minimalistic bass-line for the hook, then drops this chugging guitar lick on top of it — MMM that shit is so good! We’ve heard some of this desert-rock influence back on Skin & Earth in songs like “Savage” and “New Fears”, but honestly this hits way harder for me than those songs did in how many distinct sounds it plays with at the same time, while still bringing them all together in such an ear-worm of a track. I already know it’s gonna sound amazing live, though as a 27 year old straight man, I’m not sure how loudly I’ll be singing that hook at the NYC show lol.
Another production choice I love so much is how the second verse starts with that shouted “I PROMISE YOU THAT I DELIVER” vocal track thrown further back in the mix, then it stays layered underneath the main vocal for the remainder of the verse. That additional musical density in the verse makes it feel so dynamic when that hook comes back in and cuts all that away for the bassline. The arrangement is so good! And again, the bridge on here is my favorite part of the whole song — the way she bends her voice and enunciation sounds so siren-like to me amidst the deserted backdrop of the video.
I don’t know what else to say about this song, it’s SO catchy, from the first second to the last. I could imagine that if this is the first Lights album someone heard, it’s on this song where they’d fully get how skilled Lights has been throughout her career in writing these undeniably addicting pop cuts.
Altogether, I think this section is the lighter part of the album, one not as mired in pessimism or trauma, and instead being more reflective and emotionally transparent. In the way that her bridges provide a musical shift within songs, I think this segment provides a nice tonal shift for the whole album. One of the strengths Lights shows when taking on a new sound for a full album is how she’s able to explore all the different corners and nuances of that sound. This exploratory comprehensiveness keeps A6 from sounding same-y or like one long song. I wrote about this a lot in my review of Siberia — how the album as a whole sounds like winter, but each song approaches a different aspect of winter, whether that’s the escapism of a winter adventure, the dangerous isolation of an icy tundra, or the magical wonderland-esque feeling of walking through glistening snowflakes. I think we see that same skill being displayed in abundance on this project. The songs glue together cohesively as a single musical body, yet they stand apart from each other through the angles and emphases they each employ.
In the overarching arc of personal growth I see this album representing, I feel the first few songs focused on confronting trauma and repression, and wanting to push past them so a rejuvenation of sorts could be attained. This second portion feels like it’s about warmly yet contemplatively reflecting on various painful moments in the past and learning what we can from them as we move forward. And in the final stretch, I think we see climax and catharsis, leading to a new openness.
Transcendence
The finale of this album is a three-song run that I could put up against any other three-song run in Lights’ discography. Which is saying a lot.
We start with “The Other Side Of The Door”. The first thing we hear is again some ambient chatter, and I love it as much here as I did in the intro track. This subdued beginning then drops into a return to that synth-wave and post-punk blend from “Surface Tension”, but it’s even more energetic and driving here. That instrumentation quickly makes way for the first line of the song, which is given space to echo out:
Most days, I got freedom, but I don't have time
This line on the song is among the standouts on this album for me, and has stuck in my mind since I first heard A6. It’s a simple, straight-forward line, but it juts out poignantly because it speaks pointedly to how I’ve been feeling lately. I’m past my years of depression, cynicism, and boredom in life, but that’s been replaced with having a hundred things I want to do but not nearly enough time to fit in even half of them in a given day. This lyric reminds me of one I wrote about in my retrospective on The Listening, from “Face Up”:
Seems like the more you grow
The more time you spend alone
Before you know it
You end up perfectly on your own
Both of these lines observe and report dismaying truths about our everyday lives as we get older. These aren’t unique observations — I think almost everyone has brushed up against these feelings — but it’s rare to see these kinds of emotions covered in popular music. I think it’s something that stands apart in Lights’ music, and I’ve covered it in detail in my previous writing: she’s able to nod towards these more existential ruminations in her lyrics in a way that doesn’t seem jarring amidst the broader musical context. I think this post-punk, synth-wave sound on A6 actually feels very natural for her in consideration of that — where these ponderous moments in her prior music felt like they stood in contrast to the brighter, vibrant soundscapes they found themselves on, they feel very at home amidst this darker sound she’s crafted here. In that way, I feel like this sound was just fighting to emerge this whole time, with hints foreshadowing this eventual transition having always been present in bits and pieces throughout her discography.
This is a song where I still haven’t really pieced together what it may be about, or even formed an idea of what I think it might be about. Parts of it feel like a rumination on a loved one passing away, and at times it feels its about a failed relationship, but other parts feel entirely untethered. Let’s look at the pre-chorus and hook, for example:
It's amazing how it all goes so easy
And it slips away overnight
Outta nowhere, I am standin'
In the quiet, and just trying to feel alive
I know you can feel me at the other side of the door
La-la-la-la-la-la, I hear you singin'
Filling up the еmpty, I don't wanna cry anymore
La-la-la-la-la-la, you're singin' with me
This has that ambiguity that I’ve always loved in Lights’ writing. It seems to have just enough vagueness to it that I can’t really bring a clear meaning out of the blur and into focus. Nonetheless, it does make me feel emotional hearing it, especially the first two lines about how life can be going so smoothly then suddenly get upended by some emotionally traumatic event. I feel like I’ve had a moment like that in the past year, so every time I hear this song, it feels like it’s poking at some emotional wounds that are still not fully healed.
It’s also interesting how “filling up the empty, I don’t wanna cry anymore” is followed by the “la-la-la“s in the hook, as if she’s singing through the pain as a form of escape, and also as if the “empty” parts of the hook are literally being filled with those “la-la-la”s instead of actual lyrics. I interpret it as being at a loss for words in the wake of whatever this emotional conflict is, but then it’s followed with “I hear you singing” and “you’re singing with me”. Who is the “you”? Why is the other person also singing? I haven’t really put it together, but there’s something that still feels so tragic to me in this song despite not fully understanding what exactly it’s trying to convey.
The bridge especially makes me feel like the subject of the song goes beyond a failed relationship and into something deeper than that:
Like the shadow of a god
Just a figure in the fog
Only see you when I'm lost
The constantly-existentialist part of me can’t help but interpret this imagery of the “shadow of a god that we only see when we’re lost” as referring to seeking some kind of objective guidance in these moments where everything’s been uprooted. I try to avoid speculating on lyrics based on an artist’s personal life, but since Lights has been somewhat open about this in recent years, I wonder if this imagery in her lyrics comes from her own relationship with religion, and whether or not it continues to play a role in moments of distress and dilemma. In my writing on The Listening I discussed how I see elements of Nietzschean philosophy reflected by that album, and I think this imagery of the shadow of a missing god being visible as a hazy silhouette in the fog is SO compelling to me within that context. It evokes for me that Nietzschean idea of the God-shaped hole that still persists within our society and in our minds after seemingly having moved on from religion in favor of science and reason. I really love this bridge. To be clear, I’m not claiming at all that this is what I think Lights meant when writing these lines; I just think the poetry here sends my mind off in really interesting directions. It’s vivid and ambiguous at the same time.
From all the discussions I’ve had with other Lights fans since this album released, it seems like “Piranha” is that standout song that seems to be at the top of everyone’s list, and I completely get why. “Piranha” sounds like drowning in rough seas during a neon thunderstorm. It takes that futuristic synth-wave sound we’ve heard throughout the album but slows down the pace, letting each musical shift hit harder. The verses are mostly standalone with the instrumental being somewhat subdued during them, but when the hook comes in, it drops into this heavy, churning concoction of synths and basses, impeccably mimicking to me the sloshing and crashing of turbulent waves in the open ocean. This musical motif accentuates the song so perfectly, as the lyrics use being dragged into deep water as a metaphor for what appears to be a relationship that is dragging her out to dangerous territory:
'Cause it's harder when I wanna leave
But it's easy that I never see
You're leading me to deep water
And it's okay when I round it up
But it's just death by a thousand cuts
You're keeping me at the bottom
I’ll note about the verses that this is yet another instance of how much attention Lights seems to have given the vocal processing and arrangement in this album. I think where her music traditionally had the lead vocals way in front with some backing vocals adding texture during the hooks, bridges, or outros, I hear on A6 a lot of interplay between vocal tracks, each mixed in different ways and playing different roles. You can hear that in “Piranha” on the verses, where each line sung in her main register is met in call-and-response with a secondary vocal, at a higher register and processed more heavily. I like the dynamism this brings to the album, and it puts her vocal range on display. On Skin & Earth, it felt like she started being more comfortable flexing her vocal abilities, even confirming that as one of her intentions in an interview; I see this album as not only continuing that process, but also deepening it through the varied production and arrangement techniques she employs to add energy and depth to her vocal compositions.
After a tour de force of vocal power, dense arrangement, and heavy instrumentation, the song dwindles down to it’s conclusion, and the visualizer ends with her assuming the position on the album cover. What a finish.
Alright.
Now, I’d like to talk about my favorite song on the album.
Honestly, recency bias deeply considered and respectfully dispelled, it might even be my favorite Lights song ever.
“Day Two” is the finale to A6, and from the name, it’s a spiritual successor to one of Lights’ most underrated songs, “Day One”. Seeing this on the tracklist before release definitely made me a little excited. I’m usually someone who doesn’t eagerly anticipate releases, I tend to just take a “I’ll hear it when I hear it” approach, even for my favorite artists.
But “Day One” getting a sequel felt different. “Day One” is special to me because it’s a song whose sole existence sets Lights distinctly apart from any other pop artist I’ve heard. The very fact that a pop artist, on a pop album, would end their sophomore record with an 8-minute experimental ambient instrumental track with no conventional structuring or hook was a statement in of itself. This is an artist who makes art for art’s sake, to capture creativity and beauty in a work without tapering it down for commercial reasons. Over time, to me, this song became this crowning jewel for Lights’ career, a testament that she’s an artist who makes albums, meant to be appreciated in whole as focused, cohesive artistic compositions.
To see her sixth album indicate a return to this song made me theorize that this is an album intending to take stock of the journey that brought her here while at the same time laying course for future musical adventures — an album that would ultimately tell us something about who she is and where she’s going.
And MAN does “Day Two” deliver on all of that. Watch the visualizer. The imagery is so striking, and it’s been burned into my mind and soul since the first watch.
The song develops slowly. We hear those familiar, somber ambient pads, playing softly.
Then, the whirring synths and saws float in.
We understand right away that the naming is not a coincidence, this work is truly following in the footsteps of “Day One”.
Visually, we see her sitting on a mound, with four red-orange neon pillars surrounding her, resembling pillars of fire adapted to the futuristic aesthetic of the album.
A pyre.
This imagery is so mesmerizing and indelible to me, it is minimalistic but strongly compels the message of the song. The exact meaning of this is revealed as the song progresses.
Over a minute into the song, we see how this is different from “Day One”: there are vocals. And not just vocals — lyrics. The lyrics are sparse, but poignant.
Someday, I will come home
And when I come, I'm going
Down to the river
Drown in the water
Someday, I will come home
And when I come, I'm going
Down to the river
Drown in the water
I have been on an everlasting fire
Burning away, burning away, burning away
I've been on fire
Burning away, burning away, burning away
I've been on fire
Burning away, burning away, burning away
The symbolism of the pyre becomes painfully clear in light of the lyrics. Literally, it is depicting her on fire, burning away. The way these lyrics are repeated but not expounded upon leaves the listener to piece the tragedy together themselves. What needs to be said is being said, so that it can be released into the world, but no explanation is needed thereafter.
I’ll admit, the first time I heard this song, I did shed some tears. It feels like we are finally seeing the other side of this whole experience.
Let me explain how I interpret “Day Two”.
Throughout her career, if you ask the average fan why they like Lights, I’m sure a lot of them would have told you it’s in part because of how kind, genial, and directly connected to the fans she is. From the start, interacting with fans directly on the internet has been a huge part of Lights’ character and persona. She was even doing livestreams well before it became common for artists to do, and throughout her vlogs you can see all these interactions she’s had with fans on tour, from fans coordinating these massive projects spanning cities to give her creative and thoughtful gifts, to the many, many stories of fans meeting her and coming away talking about how friendly and humble she is. I’ll say myself, the abundance of vlogs and livestreams and the tightly-knit fan community was a big part of me becoming and remaining a fan of Lights for what is now more than a decade.
However, as genuine as all this is, I’d also assume it is SO much effort on Lights’ part. This is a little bit speculative, which I usually avoid doing in my writing because I feel at best, it’s conjecture, and at worst, it’s invasive or potentially disrespectful. But I feel in the case of “Day Two”, this impression of mine is key to how I interpret this song, and I hope the sympathy inherent to the interpretation absolves it of any potential incorrectness. To me, it comes across like a vision into this whole artist-fan dynamic from the other perspective. I’d imagine that since she’s been an artist in the public eye for the entirety of her adult life, she’d have needed to maintain this welcoming aura and be kind to all the fans she meets, even amidst all the turmoil and emotional duress she might have experienced in her personal life. All the growing up we do in our 20s, she would have had to do while being a public-facing figure, interacting with so many expecting strangers and judging eyes each day. If you’ve ever experienced a traumatic event like a breakup or a death and still had to clock in at work the next day, I’m sure you can relate to that situation of trying to be cordial and composed while falling apart inside.
Being not only an artist whose deeply personal creations are evaluated and criticized on a reductive numeric scale, but also a woman whose actions inevitably fall under further scrutiny due to the misogynistic aspects of the music industry and society at large, it can all be immensely draining and profoundly traumatic in so many ways. Having people criticize your actions in your personal life because they don’t fit some idealized persona of you they’ve constructed in their mind, or even just people speculating about the type of person you are — the damage that could accumulate from these experiences over time can really bear down on a person.
This is how I read these lyrics about being “on everlasting fire, burning away” — literally sitting on a pyre in front of a crowd, trying to be warm and inviting to everyone but gradually losing parts of yourself into the wind as the fire burns you away. Channeling this anguish into a desire to quell that fire by drowning oneself in a river is so deeply tragic to me, and it’s why the song makes me emotional. It feels like finally getting a deeper look into her side of it all, and gets at something I often feel fans can lose sight of.
Fans, often through a misguided love or a fear of change, can be very judgmental, harsh, or disrespectful when discussing the actions and decisions of their favorite artists. It’s why in this review, and in my other writings on her career, I’ve made it so clear why I try my best to avoid speculating on what aspects of someone’s personal life or beliefs “explain” the lyrics. As tempting as it is as a listener to play detective and try to unearth all these hidden meanings and tie down our interpretations to real events in the artist’s life, it is often just invasive conjecture that can violate their privacy and personhood, because we truly don’t know what the artist’s life is like, or what compels their decisions in their art and in their life. Most of us don’t even take the time to consider whether they want us to try to understand the lyrics in this way. For that reason, I’ll re-emphasize that this is just what I took this song to mean, and the actual meaning could be something entirely different, and out of respect, I don’t have an interest in prying further into the artist’s life to “prove” my understanding as right. At most, I just want to present my interpretation in hopes that it nudges people to be a little more empathetic towards the artists whose creations affect us so movingly.
“Day Two” is beautiful and haunting. It is at once expressive and understated. It introspects, but also releases. It looks to the past and integrates it with the present. It is unmistakably deep and reflective. It simultaneously evokes a meditation on mortality, and a nod towards rebirth. And most of all, it is honest and open.
Day Three, Day Four, Day Five…
A6 feels like a turning point in Lights’ career, and from what I have heard Lights speak about in recent interviews and social media posts, that turning point has been a long time coming. If I had to pick a single word to summarize this album, it would be openness. I could imagine that being a public artistic figure entails picking and choosing which parts of yourself you feel comfortable sharing with people, and likely also sharing some of these things and not getting the response you expected from people who you’d want to consider your supporters. That can be painful, and it would take a great deal of self-confidence and determination to be open and transparent despite that.
In my drafts of my writing on Skin & Earth and Pep, I wrote about how I felt like those two albums would form a loose trilogy with the at-the-time-upcoming A6. I felt like Skin & Earth had Lights starting to integrate themes that were increasingly personal or intimate, sharing parts of her that she might not have previously felt comfortable sharing in her music. I think the concept-album nature of that project was very useful in this regard, as the impersonality provided by speaking through characters might allow one to speak more candidly about ideas or experiences one might otherwise be hesitant about. I know I definitely have had moments where I felt more comfortable expressing myself abstractly in my music than in direct conversation with the people around me. Pep went even further, showcasing a much bolder Lights than we’d seen before, fully embracing herself and conveying that new self to her fans. Songs like “Rent” and “Prodigal Daughter” replaced an unassumingness I felt in her early career with a palpable air of gravity and swagger. So, I had a feeling that A6, when released, would complete this arc, being this exorcism of personal and artistic demons that would leave us with a more unleashed, uninhibited Lights moving forward. I felt this not only due to the last two albums, but also because of the promo singles that were released leading up to this album.
Now that we have the album, I feel my prediction was 100% right. The album cuts through to expose those deep-rooted repressed emotions, digs them up, feels them through without rationalizing them, and expresses them openly and plainly to the listener.
The lyrics are forthright and relatively less ornate, in the way that a person who is secure in themselves will be laxer in showing their true self without trying put on airs or affectations. There is not much prevarication, and not much pre-processing of emotions into pretty little poetic packages. It feels less like someone making a grandiose speech and more like a person talking to their friends over a drink, using simple language and casual tone to talk about important things. As someone who loved the complexity and verbosity of Lights’ lyrics on past songs like “Everybody Breaks A Glass” or “Lions”, the immediateness of A6‘s writing befits the album. As she sings on “Damage”: Life is simple with it, and it looks you in the eye. The lyrics on A6 are direct, and they look you right in the eye. And in this directness, I feel we are also getting a more genuine expression from Lights as a person; I feel more of her personality shines through, especially in the more loose songs like “Drinks On The Coast”.
The Listening had that oh-so-familiar vibe of an over-thinker trying to construct grand meanings to overcome existential anxieties. That was definitely me in my early 20s, doing anything I could to build these elaborate frameworks to make life objective and unambiguous, to no avail. This album feels like the person I’ve grown to be now, taking life as it comes, and not trying to make anything bigger than it is. Keeping it simple, being the best person I can be, and reflecting warmly and without judgment on my past so that I can appreciate how it built me to be as strong as I am today.
The sound is darker and more brooding than before, but I think that reflects the emotional turmoil of confronting ourselves and trying to grow from there. You can see the album shift from these darker sounds at the beginning to a more vibrant and emotionally expressive palette in the middle portion, then to very churning and cathartic sounds at the end. It does seem to loosely parallel how we might ruminate and dwell, then have some joyous moments, and then synthesize these dark and bright moments to learn and grow, and finally, release. I especially love how much this album incorporates all her previous sounds. It feels like this acceptance I also have developed that, despite growing a lot beyond the previous versions of myself, I still need to embrace those parts of me because they formed me into who I am.
And so, this album feels like a reflection on how Lights has gotten to where she is, from the sprinklings of the dreamy, effervescent sounds of the The Listening, to the splashes of Little Machines and Pep throughout in the way various forms of rock are effortlessly stitched into her own tapestry of synthpop. Closest to my own heart though, is how Siberia‘s influence floods in at the very end with “Day Two”. Siberia being my favorite Lights album, and my favorite album ever, it adds to the emotional catharsis the finale of the album gives me. It makes me happy to have been part of this whole journey, seeing this artist’s career unfold alongside my own growth as a person.
Most importantly, it makes me excited for what’s next. I am not a person to immediately jump to the next moment, preferring instead to take at least a year or two to digest the current album. But with how Lights’ career has developed in recent years, I sense this album to be this shedding of weight, an unveiling to us of a freer artist who can now move onward with less of a burden. For as highly as I regard Lights’ discography thus far, I firmly believe her best work still lies ahead of her.
I hope, the burning away is coming to an end, and the glowing cinders can be the fuel for a stabler, warmer future.
—Sri
If you would like to reach out to me, or discuss anything I talked about here, feel free!
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Email: sri.venkatesan23@gmail.com