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:

1. All the backing vocals that are melting into each other in the second hook
2. The slow transition from the hook into the instrumental interlude before the bridge
3. The bridge itself feels so memorable with those shouted vocals and the reverb-heavy mixing
4. 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!

Insta: @srivenkatesan_

Email: sri.venkatesan23@gmail.com

When I think about The Listening, a lot of warm feelings start bubbling up inside me.

Lights is an artist that I’ve been a huge fan of for pretty much my entire life as a music addict, and there are very few artists that I can confidently say I loved as a teenager and still love just as strongly as an adult. She’s firmly among my favorite artists of all time, right up there with Pearl Jam and Lupe Fiasco. I first found her music in high school, and from there she became one of the few artists where I’d eagerly anticipate the next release, even staying up late on release dates and discussing with other fans on the forums, well before Reddit and fan Twitter took off.

The Listening? I’ve heard this album a thousand times. In its entirety and in playlists. On streaming, on Youtube, downloaded, on CD, on vinyl, in concert. Studio versions, acoustic versions, live versions, remixes. While driving, while sitting in my room, while on the bus t school, while on the plane moving across the country for my first full-time job. I’ve heard it at 14, at 17, at 21, and now, at 27. It holds such a special place in my heart because of all of these memories and emotions tied up with it.

But never before now did I listen to this album with the intent of writing about it, with this goal of capturing how it moves me and why.

This year, I’ve been reigniting my love for music after some years of depression and turmoil, and a big part of that was revisiting Lights’ music, which I hadn’t actively followed since Midnight Machines back in 2016. And in coming back to her music, I found I still loved it just as much. I explained this deeper in my Siberia review, but one of the reasons I started writing reviews is to finally get the chance to praise artists who I feel deserve more fanfare, and more writing exploring and appreciating their work. And yes, I set up this blog and worked on my writing skills specifically so I could eventually honor Siberia with a proper, loving review.

So then when the time has come to write about Lights’ debut album, an album that has stuck with me for almost 15 years now, how do I even start? Do I start by describing the album and what I like about it musically? Do I focus instead on how I came across it and why it stayed with me? Do I detail all the things this album did that still make it unique today? Revisiting this album for the last months, listening to the project many times closely, with these waves of nostalgia washing over me, racking my brain trying to figure out what to say about this album when I have so much to say about it, I finally figured out what I wanted to focus on if I were to write about The Listening.

What I want to talk about is how this album has changed for me over the decade and a half since it first released.

I think more than any other, this is an album that has grown with me. I don’t mean its grown on me, but with me.

I don’t mean to just say “as I listened to it more, I liked it more”. No, that’s happened with a lot of albums. What I mean is, the meanings I take from this album now are entirely different from what I saw in it when I was young. It has evolved with me, its messages shining with new meaning as I have grown and matured as a person.

The Listening is an album that is very much concerned with the passage of time, taking a pining look to the past, and how things have changed since the simplicity of childhood. I’ve decided I want to write this retrospective in a way that would follow the spirit of this album, and reflect on what it means to be nostalgic, what it means to reminisce, and most importantly, what it means to grow up.

So in this look back on The Listening, I’m going to describe what this album meant to me when I first found it as a teenager; then, I’ll try to explain what it means to me now, how it has grown and changed alongside me thematically and emotionally; and from there we will wrap around to my actual review of the album, trying to consolidate what all the different Me’s listening to this album over the years saw within it.

Alright. Let’s unpack this special album.

The Listening, back then

I found this album when I was about 14, and immediately it filled a void for me personally. It emanated a warm, sincere energy to balance the cynicism and angst that I so stereotypically carried as a teenager. Being old enough to start to see the stresses of the world, but not yet old enough to really do something about it, it’s no surprise most teenagers are sarcastic and edgy, and I was no exception. My music taste pretty much matched that: grunge, metal, and 90s hip hop were my soul at the time. Which was why The Listening stood as such a balancing force for me. I felt it had this optimistic innocence to it, almost encroaching on naïveté. The production was bubbly and whimsical, the sentiments were kind and encouraging.

I feel I took a lot of comfort in this album, because at an age where I felt like I was growing up too fast, this album felt like childhood. The girl singing into the mic seemed like she could be any one of us. The songs didn’t have the dry irony or detachedness of much of the art of the time, and her voice and writing felt yearning and wishful. The album came across diary-like, with the lyrics often venting wholeheartedly about emotions, stress, love, and faith, without pretense or purple prose. It was this lack of pretense, eschewing complication, that made the album feel so genuine, so heartfelt.

From a songwriting perspective, there was something so soothing about songs like “February Air” and “Quiet”, which float by like warm lullabies. The soundscape was twinkling and cozy, the vocals gentle and breathy.

And as any Lights fans from that Myspace era know, her vlog era was such an experience, where she would have her acoustic guitar, singing songs from the EP and this album, chatting with fans — it was hard to watch any of those and not be left with a smile. It just felt so pure, so joyous. A really close-knit community too! It was just really fun being a Lights fan.

Altogether, teenage me found an escape from the world and situation around me within this album. It was a dose of simplicity and sincerity, a form of auditory eye-bleach, to palliate the increasing cynicism that was characteristic of me then.

Which is all the more interesting to me now, because of how this album makes me feel when I listen to it all grown up, how it has changed alongside me to come to represent new meanings. If you had asked me as a teenager what this album is about, I don’t think I’d have had a good answer, as I didn’t meditate on it as deeply as I have done recently. In a way, I’d even say the appeal of The Listening to me was precisely because I didn’t meditate on it, and could enjoy it without thinking too much. I believe, at the time, I lacked the life experience to properly understand what this album is about.

The Listening in 2025

So, after being a die-hard Lights fan up until about 2016, I kinda just fell out with music. Whether it was depression, major life events and career, or just coincidence, I wasn’t listening to nearly as much music, and that lasted for a long while. During these few years, I pretty much just listened to the rap music that was comfortable to me, mostly Curren$y and Griselda.

Then, towards the end of 2024, I finally returned, going back to my favorite artists, and of course, central in that process was revisiting Lights after over a half decade. I put my headphones in, hit play on The Listening, and closed my eyes.

I don’t think I’ve felt such a deluge of emotions and feelings swell up so rapidly. With how closely I used to follow her music, her vlogs, catching her on tour, and then just not doing that for 8 years, it felt like hearing from an old friend again.

Remembering all the times I’d listen to her albums on the school bus, in study hall. Desperately trying to find Siberia on vinyl as a 16 year old who just got his first shitty all-in-one record player. Following the Little Machines roll-out avidly with other regulars on the IAmLights message boar

And with that, it felt like finding a part of myself again, unlocking all these warm memories, remembering old versions of myself that had been long forgotten and lain dormant. It felt like coming home, reconnecting with my old self by reconnecting with the music my old self cherished.

And with this look back in time, I think I can now say I have a truer understanding of the album. The Listening really is an album reflecting on the passage of time. While as a teenager, I felt like the album’s sound carried a child-like exuberance to it that helped take me back to the simplicity of childhood, I think now as an adult, it feels profoundly wistful, that aforementioned exuberance coming across more like an intentional exercise, an active choice, rather than an artist simply expressing herself in the moment.

You see, a thing that stuck out to me even as a teenager was that Lights was 22 when she made this album. As silly as it sounds now, to 14 year old me, 22 definitely seemed “fully grown-up”. It stood to reason that as we got older, our perspectives would only be more jaded and pragmatic, so it was always a little perplexing to me how youthfully sincere this album was.

Being now on the other side of 22, I think I get what this album was. It now reads to me as a young adult being brought to reckon with the shifting tides of adulthood and the existential complexity it brings with it, then contending with all of that by channeling these emotions and anxieties into an album — an album that itself depicts a desire to escape these ambiguities of growing up, and yearns nostalgically for the time when it was all so much simpler. That honest vulnerability now feels less like the result of innocence or naïveté and more so this process of laying out emotions visibly so that we may work through them. In doing so, the album seems to go even further, reaching towards a resolution of these anxieties, in a development ofpersonal growth and self-confidence.

Let’s step through the album now, and I’ll explain how, as someone who struggled a lot in my early 20s with growing into a well-adjusted independent adult, this album speaks directly to this phase in our lives, and how we might try to find our way through it.

Can I Let The Ground Do The Walking?

Starting with “Saviour”, this song is a bit of a calling card for Lights, I think. The lead synth melody is iconic and unmistakeable, and within moments she’s off to the races, with no real wind-up or introduction vocally. It’s written and delivered almost like it’s an uncontrolled outpouring of confused emotions. The words are sung rapidly during the verses, and Lights is running through a laundry list of struggles she is having to confront.

The night is deafening
When the silence is listening
And I'm down on my knees,
And I know that something is missing.
Because the
Back of my mind is holding things I'm relying in
But I choose to ignore it
Because I'm always denying them

I'm a bit of a manic 
When it's not as I plan it
'Cause I start losing my head
And then I get up in a panic
Remember when we were kids
And always knew when to quit it
Are we denying a crisis
Or are we scared of admitting it?
I don't want to know

I really love how distinct this song sounds. Most pop songs tend to have some kind of soft beginning, easing into the song slowly in terms of vocals, but this one jumps immediately into a pretty dense verse, just line after line without much of a pause. Not just dense in delivery, but content: there’s heavy pensiveness in the lyrics here, dwelling on these sentiments of feeling incomplete and being unable to control the situation around her.

I think putting this song right at the front is meaningful in how it emphasizes the heady, pondering aspect of this album. The indeterminate nature of the lyrics is important to me as well — it’s clear she’s saying a lot and feeling a lot here, but it’s unspecific and vague, implying to me that it’s a complex and ambiguous problem she’s dealing with.

Note the bolded line: it’s the first of many instances on this album that wil describe wanting to go back, to when it was simpler, and all these confusions and ambiguities of adult life were not there. It’s an early inkling of what I think develops into a central theme of this album later on.

The freneticism of the delivery only comes to a break when the hook comes in, which wishes for a respite from the ambiguity, into something safe and sure. Amidst a sea of troubles, there’s this desire for something as straight as an arrow, an objective guidance.

I just want to run to you
And break off the chains,
And throw them away
I just want to be so much
And shake off the dust that turned me to rust
Sooner than later,
I'll need a saviour,
I'll need a saviour

I think it’s fitting how the delivery of the hook slows the pace of the song down; it indicates to me how seeking solace in faith or a savior might allow a person to slow down a little, and make sense of the delirium we might feel when it feels like life is coming at us at a hundred miles an hour. It feels like a reduction of the many, many things bothering us into a singular focus on something that might save us. As someone who was an atheist as a teenager and has recently incorporated more Hindu philosophies into my life, setting my focus on a single thing like breathing or a specific thought has been a great way to center myself when I’m overwhelmed, so I can definitely see a similar thing going on here in this song. It’s for these reasons that I tend to think of “Saviour” as an ode to the over-thinkers.

I think thematically it makes sense to pair an analysis of “Saviour” with the following song, “Drive My Soul”.

Seems somebody burned out the signs
I can't expect the hard curves
There's no borders, there are no lines
How can I know where to turn?

You make the streetlights reappear
I feel bright when you stand near
I know what I am when you are here
My place becomes so clear

When you're gone
Will I lose control?
You're the only road I know
You show me where to go
Who will drive my soul?

Where “Saviour” speaks on the ambiguities of adult life in a fittingly abstract and non-specific manner, “Drive My Soul” touches on the same topics with lyrics that are more visual and direct — here we have imagery of streets without signs as an analogy for the wayward, unguided aspect of having our entire future within our own control, and being daunted by the prospect.

As Kierkegaard said, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” — our freedom to choose among a million paths is really what causes us to feel so overwhelmed at this point in our lives. Personally, it was in that period from age 20 to 24 where I was most interested in philosophy, especially existentialism and Hindu philosophy, desperately seeking a way to convince myself of objective meaning and purpose in life, anything to reduce the overwhelming infinitudes into a manageable and focused path forward.

I see this struggle in “Drive My Soul”; I think when faced with this enormous difficulty in deciding which road we want to take in life, it’s very understandable to seek some divinity or grand intelligence to take the wheel on our behalf and drive us forward. As said in “Saviour”, I don’t want to know, just take control and steer me in the right direction. It can be a source of great comfort to feel like there’s someone or something watching over us, guiding us. In fact, Kierkegaard himself did believe a leap of faith to be the way out of our anxiety, so altogether I enjoy how “Drive My Soul” puts these ideas to music in such a compelling way.

I really love how this ruminating, despondent concept in the writing is paired with the instrumentation here. The pulsing synths and moody, atmospheric pads give the song a distinctly nocturnal, shimmering vibe, that when placed underneath the seriousness of the lyrics just makes this song sound so unique to me. It’s somehow exuberant and somber at the same time. The belting during the latter half of the song puts her vocal abilities clearly on display, but more importantly, I feel they show that these feelings of waywardness are not solely dismal but also powerful, in the way they can bubble up over time and cause a person to release all that energy in a burst. Overall, this has always been one of my favorite songs on the album, it’s so singable and yet the lyrics are so contemplative. I’ll speak more to this soon, but this is undoubtedly one of Lights’ most strengths as a songwriter: this ability to balance musicality and contemplation so seamlessly.

As an aside, a musical moment I really love in this song is around the 1:55 mark, in the way she enunciates the first portion of the hook just that little bit more — “who will drive my sooooulll?” — right before belting those words the next time she sings them. It’s a bit of ear candy for me, the emphasis increasing gradually, almost as if those belted vocals are trying to push their way through to the surface.

Another part of growing up is that there’s this inherent struggle with change. I think in our early 20s, everyone we know is starting to go off on their own paths. Friends we loved slowly grow apart from us, our parents visibly age before us and become less involved in our daily lives, and places we knew and grew fond of no longer maintain the same presence and relevance. Personally, the way that everything was always changing made me feel like there was nothing I could hold onto without it inevitably slipping out from my grasp, like sand sifting through my fingers. I think the third track, “River”, speaks to this same world-weariness, seeking something permanent amidst the flux and flow of life.

Out across cities I see buildings burn into piles
And watch the world in wonder as mountains turn into tiles
And trees losing their leaves, and our faces becoming tired
I wish I could discover something that doesn't expire
Come and stumble me

Take me river, carry me far
Lead me river, like a mother
Take me over, to some other unknown
Put me in the undertow
...
Such are the things that make a kingdom rumble and shatter
The same dynamic that another day would never matter
It really just depends on who's giving and who's receiving
And things that don't make sense are always a little deceiving
Come, and stumble me
...
I want to go where you're going
A follower, following
Changing, but never changed
Claiming, but never claimed

Just like the first two songs, we see the familiar structure of laying out a list of troubles that appear in this process of venturing out into the world on our own two feet for the first time, and having these confrontations erode at our sense of being. Then, there’s this longing for something to help make the problem easier to deal with — in this case, a river.

Where “Drive My Soul” was focusing on trying to illuminate the right path forward when everything is dark and blurry, “River” seems particularly concerned with things falling apart, watching this ongoing decay in dismay. I think seeing things decaying around me always disheartens me because my immediate next thought is how I’m not exempt from that process, I too will be among those decaying things in time. It’s a frightening thought for sure, and it definitely would be great if there was a river that could carry me away from that reality. I think it’s no coincidence that many mythologies across the world have associated a river with passing into the afterlife, whether its the Ganges River in Varanasi in India, or the River Styx to the ancient Greeks. The way water continuously flows, unimpeded, serves as a very visual parallel for how time flows without concern for whether we want it to slow down, carrying us all forward every second.

The bridge is potent for this reason, centering this desire for this river that is “changing but never changed, claiming but never claimed”. I originally thought this part was saying, “I’m fine with changing, but only when it’s my choice, and not from an external cause I can’t control”? I’m still not sure. It’s unclear to me whether “changing” refers to the river itself changing, or the river changing something else. I think the parallel structure with “claiming” leads me to believe the latter, that this river that is changing the land around it, claiming the banks and growing deeper and wider through erosion, while the river itself is immune to being changed or claimed by others. From there, I think my reading of this line is now “I want to make changes to the world, and make an impact, but I don’t want it to change me or claim a part of me in the process”.

I notice also that the river is compared to a mother — I think this is a significant choice of wording, evoking again that desire to be like a child, guided by the hand, taken in the undertow.

One line that always stuck out to me is “things that don’t make sense are always a little deceiving”; I feel this is one of those aphorisms we often find in Lights’ writing. These are lines that add to the theme of the song but they also stand out from the song in a way that keeps them bouncing around in my mind even when I’m not listening. I think just three songs into this debut album, we can already see her writing as something different from what is common in pop music — her style has always been more poetic, each line feels imbued with this noticeable tinge of pondering. I think where other pop music pulls off the task of getting you to think less and enjoy the moment, Lights’ writing often contains a bit more to mull over and meditate on. I think this kind of writing is found throughout her discography, most notably to me on “Everybody Breaks A Glass” from Siberia, and this juxtaposition of pop energy and meditative writing has always made her music a unique experience for me.

Speaking of Siberia, I didn’t end that other paragraph with “the flux and flow of life” as just a slip of phrasing — I do feel now that “Flux and Flow” from Siberia reads to me as a re-examination of this same idea of wrestling with impermanence and change, with Lights instead embracing the ever-changing nature of life, even taking solace in it, viewing that constancy of change as an opportunity to retry, to “take another turn with a better hand”, rather than it being something to lament.

While the previous songs take a notably Christian theming in their battle with existential confusion, “River” appeals more to nature. I would characterize it as still being religious, or at least spiritual, in the way this river is depicted as a purifying, guiding force of nature, much as an animistic or Transcendentalist framework might illustrate divinity. As an Indian, I am definitely reminded of the religious imagery of the Ganges River purifying people’s souls in Varanasi. We also see this language of “a follower following”. I think Lights has been somewhat open about the role religion has played throughout her life, from being Christian around the time of this album, to more irreligious later on.

I only bring this up to say that I won’t really be trying to connect things to her personal life in this review. I prefer to stay away from inspecting an artists’ personal life when discussing their music. Art obviously is a reflection of the artist’s experiences and trauma, and it is tempting to try to understand the “lore” behind the songs we love. But as well-intentioned as it could be, I think AT BEST, such analyses are speculative, and at worst, they’re intrusive and disrespectful of an artist’s privacy and personhood. So I will focus here and in future reviews solely on what the song itself seems to be indicating, and won’t use anything from an artist’s personal life to corroborate an analysis unless the artist themselves has shared that context publicly when discussing the work. I believe the religious undertones here to be significant insofar as it portrays one effective way a person might contend with the struggles of growing up and facing existential ambiguity, but I don’t think prying further into this particular artist’s relationship with religion is needed to appreciate this album.

Moving on, I think the title track on this album is as all title tracks should be; it captures all the musical and lyrical themes of the project in one place, a microcosm of the album as a whole. We hear the sonic palette of this album — glimmering synths, moody pads, and sweetly-sung vocal melodies. We also hear the introspection and honesty of The Listening, with Lights stating plainly the emotions she’s dealing with. Similar to “Saviour”, I feel this song feels like a mild panic attack lyrically, a stream-of-consciousness approach to depicting the situation of being overwhelmed with emotions and unable to focus and communicate.

Please excuse me, I'm not thinking clear
It must just be stress but I likely shouldn't be here, 
I'm such a mess

I never really ever know what to say
When all of my emotions get in the way
I'm just trying to get us on the same page
I always get it better right afterward
When all the wrong impressions are said and heard
How come I can never get the right words, I need to convey
Wish I could explain
 
The things that I have to work out
I don't feel right
What has come over me, I'm about
To lose my mind

I really do want to praise this song’s writing. I feel the best writers are able to directly channel an emotion into a song, without any filtering or intellectualization of it — to capture the raw feeling and convey it as it is, avoiding any processing that might strip it of that immediacy. I’m reminded of impressionist art, which intends to capture the feeling of seeing something beautiful rather than attempting to photo-realistically depict that sight. This is a place where my opinion of this album’s writing has changed over the years — I used to think it a bit simplistic, but now I view it as emotionally transparent. Instead of poetically adorning the emotion being felt, this style of writing communicates the emotion by putting us directly in the head of the person, letting us feel it in first-person. It makes the writing feel so much more alive and felt, rather than meticulous and clinical. It’s very hard to convey things exactly as you feel them.

This is all a bit ironic haha — I’m praising how effectively she communicates a feeling, on a song that’s explicitly about having difficulty expressing herself clearly.

I especially find the bridge to be really evocative, and it’s actually one of the lyrics that immediately comes to mind when I think of this album:

Can I let the trees do the talking?
Can I let the ground do the walking?
Can I let the sky fill what's missing in?
Can I let my mouth do the listening?

I feel this continues that thematic trend from the earlier songs! This song again has her detailing an emotional problem she is facing, and then wishing there was a way to defer the difficulty of dealing with that subjectivity. This time not to God or a river, but to the trees, the ground, and the sky. Of course, it’s less solution-seeking, and more of a vent, but that theme is still tangible to me whenever I hear this song. There’s just something so poignant and imaginative in the way this bridge is written that I still can’t quite put words to. So I’ll just say, I find this to be quite a cleverly-written way of saying, “Hey, dealing with this emotional stuff is really hard — can I somehow get an easier way to handle it?”

I also think the song is really beautifully sung, the vocals get the emotion of the song across perfectly. A moment I especially love is at the end of this bridge, where her singing voice starts to fade into what is almost a cry/whimper, really gluing the helplessness felt in the writing with the musicality of the vocal delivery. Overall, the frustration of not being able to communicate in a perfect, clear way is just conveyed so perfectly by the way she sings here.

Let’s Play Pretend

I think when we view this first chunk of the album together, we see a young adult beset with all sorts of existential dilemmas, trying to catch a break from the ambiguity through all the ways they can think of, whether its praying for a savior, fantasizing about floating away on a river, or venting it all into music.

I don’t mean any of this as a critique, I think it’s truly brilliant how eloquently this album puts to music what I was going through around this age. I would be seeking every and any method to reduce the subjectivity and undirected-ness of newfound adulthood into something objective and steadfast. Choosing my own path in life felt like a monumental task, and I was often paralyzed when it came to making such big decisions, wishing there was a way to make that decision easier or have someone else make it for me. It’s something we all go through and we each try to find our own ways to adjust to adulthood. I really appreciate having an album that feels like it captures this battle we all fight.

And one really important way we react to growing up is nostalgia.

We have seen sprinklings of a yearning for the past so far, but I think in “Pretend”, that becomes the focus.

This song, to me, is the conceptual anchor of the entire album. It’s the song that puts every other song into its appropriate context. It was when this song came on during my re-listen that the entire album snapped into place for me. Without this song, I don’t think I’d have reached the interpretations I’ve shared here for the previous songs; each line on “Savior”, “Drive My Soul”, “River”, and “The Listening” seems to glow so brightly with intention and conceptual coherence in the light of “Pretend”. Despite the album appearing whimsical and innocent to me as a teenager, it’s in re-listening to “Pretend” that I found all of those affirmations and optimisms to be tinged with wistfulness, with longing, with bittersweetness.

Because of how important this song is to interpreting this album, I’m going to share the lyrics for the entire song:

Once in a while 
I act like a child
To feel like a kid again

It gets like a prison
In the body I'm living in

Because everyone's watching
Quick to start talking
I'm losing my innocence
Wish I were a little girl
Without the weight of the world

It would be nice to start over again
Before we were men
I'd give, I'd bend
Let's play pretend

Remember the time
We had soda for wine
And got by on gratitude?
The worst they could do to you
Was check your attitude
Yeah, when fights were for fun
We had water in guns
And a place we could call our own
How we lost hold of home
I guess I'll never know

It would be nice to start over again
Before we were men
I'd give, I'd bend
Let's play pretend
And when it's the end
Our lives will make sense
We'll love, we'll bend
Let's play pretend

It's not going to be long
Before we're all gone
With nothing to show for them
Stop taking lives, come on
Let's all grow up again

It would be nice
To start over again
Before we were men
I'd give, I'd bend
Let's play pretend

This song is such a gut-punch to me whenever I’m listening to this album now. It feels like a sorrowful look back on the past, to a simpler time, wishing for a time machine to go back to it, leaving all of this existential grayness behind. It’s powerful, it’s alluring, it’s mournful. And it again affirms the themes of the album so far: trying to find ways to escape the problems we face as adults. I did this a lot, with my early 20s involving a phase where I’d go back and rewatch the cartoons I’d watch as a kid, or revisit places I’d often be playing as a kid, wishing desperately to have that magic and whimsy back in my life. So I definitely relate to Lights in this song.

You know which line especially gets me emotional? “How we lost hold of home, I guess I’ll never know”. It speaks to what I think is almost a form of guilt I felt for not appreciating the innocence and joy of childhood while I had it. But that’s impossible isn’t it? To understand what made that time special and innocent, you have to live without that innocence first — you have to become an adult to understand what it meant to be a child. She alludes to this directly:

Because everyone's watching
Quick to start talking
I'm losing my innocence
Wish I were a little girl
Without the weight of the world

It’s this process of losing innocence and trying to recapture it that I find is explored so vividly by The Listening. And it’s this same process that I feel this album was intended to manage. This is more of a speculative head-canon on my own part, but I like to think maybe the album sounds the way it does, and that Lights writes and sings the way she does on this album, specifically as an exercise in immersing herself and us, just one more time, in those feelings of whimsy and nostalgia. In comparison to all of her later work, The Listening stands out uniquely: its production is bubbly and dreamy; Lights’ voice is breathier and gentler; and the writing is simpler, more emotionally direct, and more unassuming. It is through “Pretend” that I feel my impression of the album’s spirit went from it being a genuine reflection of an innocent and optimistic person, to being the outpouring of a person longing to recapture such innocence and optimism, having lost it in the process of growing up. I see this in the very first line: “once in a while, I act like a child, to feel like a kid again”.

Take a look at some of the music videos from this album:

What sticks out to me is the juxtaposition of these pensive, heady lyrics with this DIY, retro-futuristic aesthetic of the videos of The Listening. It comes across like a kid being given a small budget to shoot a video, and they’re putting all the stuff a kid would find cool into it. The astronaut, spaceships, the control console with the glowing buttons and knobs — it all just evokes these nostalgic memories of low-budget 80’s sci-fi movies or children’s TV like Power Rangers and Lazy Town. The contrast of these childlike elements with the solemness of the lyrics is palpable but nuanced in how it distinctly gives the feeling of an adult looking back with nostalgic sadness at things they loved as a kid. It gives me the same feeling I had when I found a box full of my old toys I’d play with as a kid, and pulled them all out to just play with them all one more time and reminisce. I can feel this aesthetic tying in with the overall theme I just mentioned; trying to pull together the memories of childhood and immerse ourselves in them once more in an attempt to rekindle that magic.

Maybe this is why, when I was a teenager, this album sounded like childhood to me.

Looking for Wisdom in the Dark

I think this now sets the stage for the changes we see in the second half of the album. I truly feel now that the second half of the album reads as a direct response to the first half. The first half is largely characterized by a person feeling distraught by the pains and sorrows of growing up, besieged on all sides by problems and ambiguities, seeking some form of escape from it all. The second half flips that, demonstrating this great character development that resembles a Hero’s Journey of overcoming one’s struggles and becoming stronger through them.

It begins with “The Last Thing On Your Mind”, which is the first of Lights’ “uplifting” songs on this project. As a teenager, I used to read these songs as straight-forward empowering songs meant to encourage younger listeners to fight through their struggles, almost feeling a little saccharine to me as a result. I now view this differently. Let’s look at the lyrics of the hook, leading into the second verse:

Sing, the last thing on your mind
The last word on your breath
I'll be the one to keep you
I'll keep you at your best
The last thing on your mind
'Cause I don't need your mess
I'll be the one to keep you
One disaster less

Straighten up your tie
Take the microphone
Forget about it
Don't let it get you down

It’s actually a line from a later Lights album, PEP, which I feel changed my perspective on this song: “Nothing like a pep talk to yourself, it works every time”. From the line about taking the microphone, I get the feeling she’s talking to herself in this song, because it seems to be motivating a performer to take the stage. Or, it could just be reaching to anyone else who’s in a similar position.

I also notice an interesting parallel between this song and the title track. “The Listening” had her venting everything she feels insecure about and exclaiming “I’m such a mess“, and here it reads like she’s singing back to that version of her, saying “I don’t need your mess, now get back on stage and sing :)”. It could just be a phrasing she likes using, but to me it comes across like a callback. I think where the first half was more passive, showcasing someone who is singing about things happening to them, there’s a shift to a more active, commanding role starting with this song.

In that vein, we see another contrast to the earlier songs: “Saviour” and “Drive My Soul” have this pleading for someone to come and save her, but in this hook, she is the savior, she is the one who will be preventing disaster. I think one of the ways I was able to fight through my struggles with purpose during that period of my life was to find inherent meaning in helping others, whether through organizing for political and workplace action, or just trying to help people in everyday life. I see that idea being manifested in The Listening, that one way to resolve the ambiguity of right and wrong without objective morality is to simply live with the purpose of uplifting others. I can imagine that with this being her debut album, maybe she was able to find meaning in being an artist who can help people through her music.

“Face Up” has a similar gist, its emotional exigence being the same desire to emotionally uplift others while still reading like it’s partially directed at herself as a pep talk. The way the first verse is written in first-person perspective followed by the hook being in second-person definitely leads me to view it as this internal dialogue of sorts with herself.

I think the second verse is especially pointed when it comes to the changes we notice in growing up and witnessing the passage of time:

Seems like the more you grow, the more time you spend alone
Before you know it, you end up perfectly on your own
The city's shining bright, but you don't see the light
How come you concentrate on things that don't make you feel right 

I just want to feel alive

The times you don't wanna wake up
'Cause in your sleep it's never over when you give up
The sun is always gonna rise up
You need to get up, gotta keep your head up
Look at the people all around you
The way you feel is something everybody goes through
Dark out, but you still gotta light up
You need to wake up, gotta keep your face up

The first two lines hit really close to home, especially as a man, because I feel whether due to toxic masculinity or regressive gender roles, a lot of us have trouble maintaining relationships in adulthood. This leads to a painful lingering loneliness, partly of our own creation, partly a result of culture. I appreciate hearing something like this discussed in a pop song; I think the isolation people often feel as they get older and drift from their close friends is something so common and so dismaying, yet so under-represented in mainstream music. Probably because it’s a bit of a moodkiller to think about, but hey, as a fan of metal, goth, and emo, I think the sad emotions deserve just as much love in pop music as the happy ones.

In a way, I also see those latter two lines in the second verse as responding to “Drive My Soul”. In that song, she was lamenting that it feels like the lights and signs of the city have been put out, leaving her without direction. Here, we see a return to the lyrical motif of lights and the city, except it’s being flipped; the lights are still shining, it’s just that she couldn’t see them. Being “unable” to see the lights that are already there is a common trope when it comes to depression and purposelessness, and I feel “Face Up” when read this way comes across again as a response to the first half of the album. “Dark out, but you still gotta light up” shares this overall sentiment I see in the second half, which is that you can’t really expect someone or something else to come save you, you need to pull yourself out from that abyss yourself. You will need to be your own guiding light.

I feel these ideas are expressed most emphatically in the next song, “Lions”.

In the Hero’s Journey arc I mentioned this album having, I feel “Lions” is the part where the supposed superhero figures out how to use their powers.

This song tears down the fearfulness that the first half presented, and I think it’s here where the writing most directly addresses each anxiety displayed in the earlier songs. Again, I’ll share the lyrics of the entire song so we can step through it and dissect each line, each choice of phrasing.

Give me a disaster, give me emergency
Stand me at the head of the crusade without a remedy
Show me to the shipwreck, show me how your bones shake
And when I'm at the edge of sorrow's blade, show me how a heart breaks

Be steady on your feet
No matter the trouble you meet

Lions make you brave
Giants give you faith
Death is a charade
You don't have to feel safe to feel unafraid

Find me at the bottom looking at the vultures
Standing in the heart of the disease, following the hard curves
I'm looking for the thunder, I'm looking for the blackness
I'm learning how to get up off my knees and all takes is practice

I'm not the hunter, I'm not the marked
Just looking for wisdom in the dark

The first verse immediately strikes me as a changed, stronger person. No longer are we looking for an escape, a savior, a deus ex machina, to give us an alternative to facing up our fears head on. Instead, we are actively seeking danger, actively seeking pain, actively seeking trouble, with the intent of being brave in spite of them to grow stronger.

From “I need a saviour”, to “stand me at the head of the crusade, without a remedy”.

Where “Saviour” was about wanting safety, “Lions” exclaims that “you don’t have to feel safe to feel unafraid”.

Where “Saviour” has her “down on her knees” knowing that “something is missing”, “Lions” has her “learning to get up off her knees, and all it takes is practice”

Where “River” was lamenting things that fall apart over time, seeking permanence, “Lions” instead wants to be taken to the shipwreck, to the broken hearts, to the vultures feasting on decay.

Where “Drive My Soul” lamented not being able to “expect the hard curves“, “Lions” has her “standing in the heart of the disease, following the hard curves“.

Where “Drive My Soul” was distressed that “somebody put out the lights, I can’t see past the shadows”, “Lions” has her “looking for wisdom in the dark”.

No longer are we running from the ambiguity. Instead, we are seeking the blackness, immersing ourselves in the darkness, and finding our strength and courage in how we handle it.

Fear doesn’t make you weak, it makes you strong when you face it.

Lions don’t make you cowardly, they give you the chance to be brave.

Death is not this inevitable final state that looms over all of our lives, casting each action we take into a futile meaninglessness; death is a charade, an eternal adversary against whom we can measure our own worth, our own will to live, our own meaning.

I think the way “Lions” copies the exact same phrasings from the previous songs is not a coincidence . Even if it’s not an intentional callback, I think it at least indicates that the song is ruminating on those same problems and responding to those dejected sentiments on the first half, offering instead a perspective of strength and perseverance.

I find this song to be a bit Nietzschean, as a lot of his work revolves around seeking turmoil and pain so that you may become strong by overcoming them. This is an endeavor that involves ditching mental crutches we might employ to avoid leaving our comfort zone, so that we may fearlessly move towards the unknown to find our selves within that confrontation. He goes as far as to say that he wishes the worst ordeals and tribulations upon those he loves the most, for only in overcoming adversity do they become great. As Lights writes here, we must seek the thunder and the blackness, and become stronger by overcoming them.

Interestingly, Nietzsche explains this process of personal development through three “metamorphoses of the spirit”, each represented by a creature, with the first being the camel. The camel is given safety and sustenance by its overseer, yet lacks any agency and sense of identity among the herd, being entirely dependent on externalities to protect and inform it. It nobly yet painstakingly shoulders the weight of all the notions and fears it has been handed down, regardless of how these inherited beliefs might limit its own growth. And what is that second metamorphosis, the animal that Nietzsche claims has the claws needed to tear down the ideas that keep it from being its best self? The animal that has the independence to act on its own convictions, and the strength to boldly confront its fears? The lion. How fitting

A Release

And in a way, I think “Quiet” could be understood as the third metamorphosis, and more broadly, as the ultimate conclusion of the album. I almost feel like this should be the closer, though I go back and forth on that idea.

Let me explain what I feel “Quiet” represents in the narrative arc I see running through the album. It stands as this moment of realization that comes after one has fought through their struggles with purpose and meaning, torn down the hesitancy standing in their way, and, with this newfound bravery, is able to now attain a measure of inner peace. It feels like a deep exhalation, a release, a catharsis.

“Quiet” is a resolution to the conflict of the album. It looks neither to escape nor confront; it looks neither to the past nor the future. It seeks to be. Just be.

I'm not yours, and you're not mine
But we can sit and pass the time
No fighting wars, no ringing chimes
We're just feeling fine

This is where we're supposed to be
Sitting by a broken tree
No tragedy, no poetry
Just staring at the sky

I could wait a thousand hours
Stay the same in sun and showers
Pick apart a hundred flowers
Just to be quiet
Tell me when you feel ready
I'm the one, there's not too many
Hold my hand to keep me steady
Just to be quiet with you

Gone is that feeling of being racked with apprehension for an uncertain future, or succumbing to a longing for a simpler past.

“I’m not yours, and you’re not mine. But we can sit and pass the time.”

“This is where we’re supposed to be…No tragedy, no poetry, just staring at the sky”.

This song abandons any desire to be elsewhere in space, elsewhere in time. All we care about is the here and now. All we can ever have is here and now. We can never have the past, it is lost to time. And we can never have the future, it will forever be beyond our grasp. We can only find peace here and now.

And with this embracing of the here and now, our anxiety with the passing of time fades away too. Where the early parts of the album are so desperately trying to stop the clock from running, looking to clutch firmly to the simplicity of the past, here she’s perfectly fine waiting “a thousand hours”.

That line paired with “staying the same in sun and showers, just to be quiet” expresses a complete indifference to the passage of time or a changing environment. It is fine if time is passing, or if the environment is changing, because I will stay the same, and I can wait, and I can sit quietly, at peace. It’s all fine with me. We’re just feeling fine.

I’m actually reminded of a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Truly, I feel this song speaks volumes to that; we’ll find peace when we can have a mind that’s calm enough to sit quietly, feeling fine. At the end of an album that seems rife with overthinking and anxiety, this is a song that finally lets go, and seeks to just enjoy the moment.

This song to me is about finding peace within, or with someone, rather than expecting the danger and stress to go away. Finding happiness simply in what we have right now. No tragedy, no poetry, just staring at the sky. It’s all such a change in perspective from “River”. We can all really be so much happier if instead of seeking beauty in these grand, abstract machinations like permanence, objective meaning, or life-long purpose, we could just find beauty in the sky, the flowers, a broken tree, or a moment of quiet.

Maybe this is due to my own Hindu leanings, but I enjoy interpreting this song position at the end of the album as meaningful, due to this Hindu idea that we will find everything we so dearly seek in the last place we think to look: the self. Perplexing right? The first thing we know to exist, the self, is the last place we expect to find our solutions. It’s obviously tough experiencing pain and confusion, but it’s a miracle that we have this consciousness that allows us to experience anything at all. I think there’s bliss in being aware of that. The problems of the future, the longing for the past, the stresses of the world — they all melt when we can find bliss right here, right now, by ourselves.

I know I’ve been leaning a little heavy into philosophy throughout this retrospective, which could seem over-analytical to many, but I would beg to differ. I think philosophy isn’t this overly high-minded, abstruse activity limited to academics and essays; it’s really super practical and the ideas we learn from it are to be found everywhere, in any work of art and in everyday life.

My goal here isn’t to claim that Lights intentionally put these these meanings into these songs, or to do that kind of reaching that a lot of fans do when trying to hype up the depth of writing of an artist they like.

No, I’m just trying to say, every work of art carries a lifetime of experience within it, with every moment in the artist’s life leading to the next and eventually culminating in this creative product we get to experience. Even behind a single line, there’s a lot of meanings, intentional or not, that we can try to piece together. And these meanings are not just sourced from the artist or the artwork, but also from the experiences of the audience. It’s a conversation between the world, the artist, and the listener. So as a person who loves philosophy, when I hear a line as seemingly simple as “No tragedy, no poetry, just staring at the sky”, I can’t help but see such a depth of important knowledge being delivered there. Sometimes complexity really does obscure us from being happy — sometimes we just need to slow down, be quiet, and take in the world around us.

For the past decade, this song has been special to me. More special than any other song. I’ve listened to this song whenever I was dealing with a really stressful issue, one that was making it hard for me to sleep or focus. Whether it was a major final exam, a job interview, a meeting with my manager when I’m expecting news about whether I’ll be promoted, crucial moments in a relationship, or family conflicts. This song always put me at ease. And specifically, I would listen to this acoustic performance of it.

Prior to re-listening and dissecting this album this year, I found this performance and song calming because it came across to me as pure, innocent, worry-free, sweet, and simple. But now I see there was always something more to it. “Quiet”, through its sound, its writing, its melodies, its vocal performance, and especially its positioning within the album, consolidates so perfectly what I feel happiness is. It’s not the absence of worry, the absence of suffering, or the absence of complexity. “Quiet” represents the state of mind we should all aim to cultivate, in which we’re able to nonetheless find bliss at the end of this worry, suffering, and complexity — by thinking less, feeling more, and accepting what it means to just be. It is at once the hardest and easiest thing to do.

“Quiet” is my favorite song by Lights, and possibly my favorite song of all time. I think were this album to fade into, fittingly, quiet after this song, it would be a perfect closer, but I think the actual closer to the album is just as meaningful in its own way.

We end the album with a reprise of “Pretend”.

I think the album closing with “Pretend” again does a few important things. First, it reaffirms to me the importance of this particular song to this album, and therefore makes me more confident in my reading of this album as being about reflecting on the past, and growing up. Second, I think finishing the album with an organic sound, just piano and vocals, without the synths and vocoders, gives the conclusion a “back to reality” feel. We’ve played around and reveled in the past and in nostalgia for a while. Putting the whimsical synths aside now, it’s time to return to our lives and handle what needs to be handled, with the knowledge gained from this journey of personal growth in hand.

And most importantly, I think ending the album with the line “Let’s all grow up again” is so perfect. It leaves me the strongest feeling of bittersweet determination, of pining and strength, of looking back warmly on simplicity but without fear of the present and the future.

I think this iteration of “Pretend” reads differently now that we’ve experienced the second half of the album. “Let’s all grow up again” when we heard it first in the middle of the album came across as “Can we go back to childhood and be happy again, please?”.

But now, it feels like it’s being said with the sentiments of “Face Up”, “Lions”, and “Quiet” in mind: “Let’s all go through this journey of personal growth again”. The more I write about this album, the more connections I make back to Nietzsche. This time, not the three metamorphoses, but the concept of eternal recurrence. To summarize the idea, he argues that we will know that we are living a life we are content with if, when asked the question, “Would you do it all over again, exactly as it played out, without any changes?”, we answer with a resounding and triumphant “YES”.

YES, let’s go through all those struggles with self-doubt and the loss of innocence again.

YES, let’s fight those battles again, become strong again.

YES…let’s all grow up again.

Let’s do it all again, every second of it, exactly as it was.

15 Years of The Listening

How interesting that this album has come full-circle for many of us Lights fans. I’m 27 now, and when I heard this album first, I was in my teens. I was listening to this album back then, taking in these spacey, synth-laden melodies, with lyrics dreaming about childhood and how the years have flown by, just wishing for a time machine to go back to those simpler days.

And now, for many of us, the album itself has become that time machine that it was wishing for. We all listen to the album now and reflect so fondly now on those years back when this album came out, remarking about how it was all so simple back then. How ironic, how fitting.

If you wanna see what I mean, just go to the music video of any song from this album and take a look in the comments. You’ll no doubt see all these fans, coming back to these songs over a decade later, sharing how strongly they wish they could have those years back, how much they cherish those memories of being young, the comfort this album brought them then, and the comfort it brings them now when they reminisce.

It’s really magical how people seem to be transported back to the good old days when they listen to this album. I go back to this album when I want to reconnect with the younger version of myself, and the feelings of aspiration and dreaming that were there before the adult world kicked in. For that reason, this album still stirs such strong emotions within me, stronger than the emotions it carried when I first fell in love with it. The years have made it heavy for me. That’s why even though I consider Siberia my favorite Lights album, it’s The Listening that hits me the hardest in my feelings these days.

I think I, like many other Lights fans, had an emotional reaction to the callback to The Listening in the music video for “Okay Okay” from 2022’s PEP. The concept of the video is that she doesn’t have money from the label to shoot a video for this song, so she’s cobbling something together herself, by reaching out to the different “versions” of her she’s manifested in her music and asking for ideas.

So she’s having these text convos with the versions of her from each song on this album, with one suggesting doing TikTok dances to her songs, another saying to try a live concert clip, etc. — until one suggests going with an “old school” vibe…

When she popped out as The Listening-era Lights, I definitely shed a happy tear :’) It was like every time Kiryu puts on his grey suit again in the Yakuza series (IYKYK haha).

Likewise, it was beautiful seeing the collective appreciation for The Listening and the fanbase it formed culminating in a song commemorating the album’s 10th anniversary and its impact on Lights’ career. And the cover art riffing on the Acoustic EP was the icing on top. “Long live The Listening and everything in between“.

All of these things come together for me in telling the story of The Listening.

It’s an album that, in 2009, was looking back in time and reminiscing about the simplicity of childhood. Then, throughout the ensuing decade, we have all these fans coming back to this album to recapture the time in their lives when they were listening to this album, reminiscing about how those years around 2009 to 2011 were so much simpler. And for a song to then be released ten years later in 2019, looking back on The Listening itself, reminiscing about Lights’ own life at the time, and how time as passed since then — It’s all so perfect, isn’t it? We’re always looking back on the present time and saying it was golden — I wish we could see it as golden when we’re still here. I feel that’s what “Quiet” was always about to me.

What’s also interesting is how many of the lyrics on Lights’ later albums continue to explore the topics this album broaches upon. I didn’t reach this reading of The Listening until this year, but since I started writing this retrospective, a lot of lines on Little Machines and Pep seem to glow with further nuance. I will likely cover these more when I review those albums, but to explain what I mean, it seems those later albums still reflect on this idea of becoming an adult meaning a lack of objective guidance. But where The Listening felt apprehensive about these changes, I think songs like “Lucky Ones” and the entirety of Pep express a more firmer confidence about taking life as it comes and letting a lot of that anxiety melt away. I definitely had that same growth in myself over the last few years; we can’t really predict life or try to force it into a path we’ve pre-decided, we just have to figure out what kind of person we want to be and let that guide us through whatever absurd randomness life hits us with.

Who knows?
Doesn't matter anyway
Let's go
You and I will be okay
'Cause after all this time
Still don't know where we're going
But look how far we've come
And as long as you're just as lost as I am
I'll hold you in the morning
Like we're the lucky ones
Hey, we made it this far
I'm here undirected
No one knows where we are
We're just guessing

Conclusions + A Round Of Applause

So yes, revisiting this album brought back a lot of touching memories, reminding me why I loved it in the first place, and revitalizing my love for Lights’ music.

And yet, I feel as a teenager I didn’t fully appreciate how unique this album was. Bubbly, spacey synth pop isn’t as common as we’d like to think it is. And synth-pop that can pack as much emotion into each song is even harder to find.

I think I’ve finished with the main analysis I wanted to make of this album, what it means, and how it has changed over time. Now, in light of that, I feel like it’s worth ending this review with some much due praise of things I feel Lights deserves more credit for, that most music discourse doesn’t seem to have shined a light on.

In my opinion, this album stood the test of time due to a few things Lights did very uniquely, especially considering the time when The Listening was released.

It’s a markedly introspective album, one that was unafraid to speak candidly about emotional and existential problems. With how the last decade of pop music has been defined by introversion, a rejection of grandiose larger-than-life superstar personas, and further honesty and effort within the lyrics, it’s easy to miss that this album came well before that shift. Artists like Lorde, Broods, and CHVRCHES brought this more intelligent, reflective, introspective side to pop music, but those acts didn’t break onto the scene until 2013 at the earliest.

Lights was already doing that here, in 2009. She’s not the first to express herself sincerely on a pop song, but before 2010, there were very few being so transparent, especially compared to how that has become the modus operandi for many artists now. Pop was still squarely in its era of singers being these mythical, grandiose superstars. Lights at the time was already ahead of the curve I think, instead being this very relatable, forthcoming artist. Not only in her music, but also in the way she was so directly connected with her fans through social media.

Really, think about it. The most prevalent characteristics that defined pop music marketing from 2010 to 2020 was relatable vent-y lyrics, increased usage of social media for promotion, and breaking down that fourth wall between the star and the listener and replacing it with a perceived “I’m just like you!” persona. In truth, when combined with capitalism and consumerism, we see this dynamic now veering ever closer to what we now call a parasocial relationship between the artist and the listener.

Lights since 2009 has been the genuine, non-manufactured version of this — It feels like some label exec saw how she wrote her music, promoted it on MySpace, did vlogs, and cultivated the admiration of her fans, and decided that should be the template moving forward for blowing up an artist on the internet. She was even doing livestreams well before I remember anyone else doing it!

I think she also deserves a lot of credit for being this kind of artful, thoughtful pop artist well before it became the trend in the mainstream, and more importantly, before it became appreciated and accepted by critics. Media journalism shifted into its period of “poptimism” later in the 2010s, marking a greater critical appreciation for popular media in being able to create genuine, meaningful art while still crafted to have broad appeal. I think had The Listening and Siberia come out just four or five years later, these albums, and Lights herself, would have garnered much further acclaim and appreciation for their artistic merit. Even amidst an energetic catchy song, Lights never hesitates to still give the lyrics that extra bit of attention, to truly make the writing strong enough to stand on its own two feet, even if the music were not there to back it. This isn’t a hypothetical either, you can listen to any of her acoustic albums and see how her writing can shine through even when the entire backing instrumental is upheaved.

The adventurousness of her music doesn’t stop with switching from synths to acoustic either. As is with any other album in Lights’ discography, The Listening stands unique because she has never repeated herself. Siberia was noticeably different in themes and sound, as were her third, fourth, and fifth albums.

I think this album will always be special in her catalog for how the writing is so direct, unembellished, lacking pretense. In my review of Siberia I spoke on how my favorite part of Lights’ writing is the abstract, fantastical nature of it, where the meanings of lines are often obscured ever-so-slightly by the imagery they evoke; on The Listening, the emotions are laid bare in plain language. If there’s one thing that’s prominently showcased on The Listening, it’s feeling.

My favorite lyric on this entire album is also the most simple, the most direct. It’s on “Saviour”:

I just want to be so much.

This line gets to the heart of this album. It encapsulates what I find most salient in her writing style on this album. One line, seven words, but the emotion contained within is deep as an ocean. Yearning is the essence of this album, and it’s in this line where I see it put forth most directly, without qualification, without hesitation. This line isn’t written with some prosaic, ornate complexity — but the feeling is so convincing. It’s an unrelenting, deep yearning that can only be expressed as “I just wanna be so much”. Nothing more needs to be said. On the verge of new adulthood, it feels like ambition, like drive, in anticipation of all the possible things a person can grow to be.

On the other hand, the sound of this album is at once somber and exuberant, with songs like “February Air” and “Drive My Soul” feeling like a warm fire on a cold night. Her singing here is breathier, more expressive. There’s an analog warmth to the whole album sonically and vocally that stands in stark contrast with the frigid and synthetic palette of Siberia or the organic live rock aesthetic of Pep.

It is in these differences that I feel we can best find Lights’ talent. It’s very hard to make one great album, to construct one unique sound and stick to it for a full project. It’s much, much harder to do that with each album, continuously evolving, changing , and reacting to the aesthetics and themes of the previous project.

I think The Listening is a gem of an album, one that I’ve cherished for a long time. I’ve been a fan of so many genres, from metal to goth to hip hop to jazz, and yet this album remains atop my pantheon, firmly among the best of them all. I think this album is really special for how it is able to so cogently capture that feeling of waywardness we feel when first moving into adulthood, with every path ahead of us and no clear guidance on which one to take. This album speaks movingly to the stresses that come from trying to create our own meanings in that phase of our life, whether through our connections to faith or nature, in embracing our emotions with openness, or in seeking to uplift others. And as time has marched onwards, this album still holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts. For the love this album brings out from its fans, I think Lights is definitely owed her flowers.

To Lights — As time passes, we will always be listening.

There are a lot of things pop music can set out to do. Obviously, commercially, often the goal is to achieve massive popularity and financial success, as the name of the genre entails. More interestingly though, is to think about what pop music can try to do musically. When making a pop album, the most common goal could be to get people to dance. Or, maybe, the goal is to make people feel happy and young, or inject energy into a movie scene or party.

But it’s not often that we see pop music with the effect of transporting you to another place. Genres like dungeon synth or black metal commonly take this as their main goal, encouraging you to envision yourself in another world for the duration of the album.

Take the albums At The Heart of Winter by Immortal or Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone — these are black metal records whose express goal is to use their oppressive blast beats and intense distorted guitars to evoke the feeling of being stuck in a brutal Norwegian blizzard. I’ve actually published a research paper detailing how that genre in particular often tries to capture climate and environment in sound, and exploring what factors might lead to that kind of intent.

Pop music, though? Usually this kind of mental transposition is not its goal. But let’s take the moment to ask the question: if a pop album were to take aim at the same target, and try to immerse you into a frigid winter landscape, what would that sound like? Moreover, what does winter even sound like musically? Can it take different forms?

This is the exact place where I feel Siberia by Lights takes its boldest strides. Through and through, it’s a sprawling tapestry of synth-pop that takes you into the depths of its Siberian isolation, and keeps you there for its entirety. Where the aforementioned black metal albums illustrate winter as an unrelenting, antagonistic tour-de-force from start to finish, Siberia instead explores many different facets of winter using a sleek, modern palette of icy synths, glitchy drums, and frosty vocals. I am unsure whether this was Lights’ direct intent when crafting this project, or if winter was simply the environment in which she made this album and thereby indirectly channeled it into the music. Nonetheless, to me, the whole album is frozen over with this icy aesthetic, each track capturing a different aspect of winter, illuminating its own part of this wintery collage. In doing so, it feels like Lights takes this loose concept-album structure and delivers an album that is at once varied yet incredibly cohesive, experimental yet immensely catchy, meticulous yet palpably adventurous.

Into The Wild

Kicking it off with the title track, it’s something of a launching pad for the themes of the album.

From the busy parks, 
To the icy tides
Someday we’ll decide 
Where we want to live out our lives
For now we're two sparks
Tumbling along
Keeping the heat on
Even though summer's come and gone
...
I would sail across the east sea
Just to see you on the far side
Where the wind is cold and angry
There you'll be to take me inside
We'll find ways to fill the empty
Far from all the hysteria
I don't care if we suddenly
Find ourselves in Siberia

This track feels like the start of the journey. There’s a clear romantic component throughout the song, but I’d like to point out the escapism that feels so central to this song. It’s enunciated further in the song’s outro where she sings “We’ll leave Canada, for Siberia”, underscoring a desire to leave familiar grounds and go on an adventure.

These feelings of impending adventure are not only expressed in the lyrics, but to me, they’re reflected in the production as well. There’s a breakdown in the middle of the song, where everything grinds to a halt, with the synths and drums cutting out and giving way to a whirring arpeggiated saw — it always evoked for me the sound of a propeller starting on a jet plane or boat, and departing that comfortable place and heading out into the frozen wilderness. I think this yearning for risk and disruption to the mundane is especially interesting in contrast with the themes of her debut album, The Listening, which seemed to be about seeking safety and certainty in the process of growing up.

There’s also this idea of leaving the turbulence and noise of the city and isolating yourself in the polar tundra; I find this so appealing. I’ve often watched documentaries about the people living in remote frozen locations like Yakutsk, Yellowknife, or the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and fantasized about how, despite the severe environment, it must also feel somewhat meditative and relaxing to be so far from all the commotion of society. Something deep inside me is tugged at when I think of these isolated areas so untouched by urban sprawl. I think all of this is captured so perfectly in her CBC Music special, where she heads to Inuvik in the arctic Canadian North for the Sunrise Festival.

“Where The Fence Is Low” pulls at that same feeling of treading into the forbidden and foreign. If I recall correctly, Lights mentioned in an interview that this song was inspired by a recurring dream she’d have, where there’s a fence with a certain spot where it’s lower, seemingly beckoning her to escape and venture out into whatever is beyond that fence. I really like the sense of impending danger this song elicits — “I’m off of my rope here, I’m off on my own here, where the fence is low”. Danger, but at the same time, adventure. The bridge later in the song just cements that feeling of adventure, and I really like how that bassy dubstep synth that plays during the hook almost has the churning ebb-and-flow of white water rapids, carrying someone away after losing hold of their rope. That’s ultimately the image this song conjures in my head, a person desperately fighting through rushing rapids in a sprawling tundra, reminiscent of the film Into The Wild. This is one of my favorite songs on this album, and sonically, that main synth whistle the song starts with is one of my favorite sounds I’ve heard in music, period. Pure ear candy.

One decision I want to make note of in these first two songs, which will surface in later songs as well, is how often in this album we hear post-choruses or bridges which are either an instrumental breakdown or forego any lead vocals with lyrics. Refer to how “Where The Fence Is Low” has this bridge that’s mainly an instrumental buildup and drop, complemented by non-lyrical vocalizations (“ohhhh”). Lights comes across to me as an artist who is more actively involved sculpting the production of her albums than other pop artists might be, and I think that is why we often hear her giving the instrumentation and production space to shine, whether that’s by carving out instrumental sections within songs, having her vocals sometimes further back in the mix during the crescendo of a song, or by having changes in instrumentation demarcate the structure of the songs. I really appreciate this aspect of her songwriting because with each project taking its own sound, I like hearing that sound given the spotlight for a few moments here and there.

Furthermore, I think this kind of song structure, where there’s a vocal hook followed an instrumental ear-candy post-chorus segment, has somewhat defined much of pop songwriting over the past decade (example, example). I didn’t hear it as much around the time this album came out, so I think Lights deserves some props for being ahead of the curve here.

I believe in the same interview, she went on to explain how after she finished writing this song, that recurring dream never occurred again. I am someone who likes to make meaning out of dreams, because I think in a Jungian sense, dreams are often the most direct and experiential encounters we have with the unconscious mind, and as a result they can often be a way of understanding the things that we have in the back of our mind but aren’t necessarily paying active attention to. I think the fact the dream didn’t come up again implies to me that there was this unconscious desire for adventure that was then satiated by the process of making these adventurous songs and traveling to the Arctic Circle. I’ve had similar experiences where a recurring dream felt like it was trying to tell me about something I’m longing for but not nurturing, only to see that dream then fade away once I made efforts to realize those deeper desires.

The album then swings into what’s probably its biggest commercial hit: “Toes”. This song is so, SO good oh my god! If “Siberia” focused on the escapism and adventure that winter and Siberia could represent, and “Where The Fence Is Low” gave us a taste of the danger and apprehension of being taken by the unknown, then “Toes” delivers on the magical, wonderland side of winter. That main synth that pulses throughout the song glistens like snowflakes twinkling on a night of fresh snow. And that hook! It’s so catchy! This is the closest this album gets to a straight-forward pop song IMO.

Lyrically, there’s a sharp beauty that sticks out to me about the hook:

Oh, you capture my attention
Carefully listening, don’t wanna miss a thing
Keeping my eyes on you
Oh, you capture my attention
I’m anticipating
I’m watching and waiting
For you to make your move

I think the way this song approaches love is really unique, the hook seems to entirely find itself within that single moment where someone would be waiting in anticipation of what their lover is going to do in that second. It’s like being frozen in place, frozen in time, awaiting the next chess move, the next step in this dance between two people.

One of the most beautiful works of prose I ever read was the first chapter of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. If you haven’t read it, in this chapter, Proust offers the most enchanting description of the very second you wake up in the morning, and how, in that single moment amidst the darkness, you need to piece together your entire existence: pulled from whatever fantastical dream you were in, you now realize you’re in your bedroom, making out the silhouettes in this room, resolving those shadows in the darkness as your lamp, your shelf, your closet; then, remembering who you are, what happened yesterday, what will happen today. What I love about this chapter is the way it ascribes such rich meaning and depth to what is but a single fleeting moment in time. An entire chapter, for a single moment. And I think Lights does the same thing for me in this hook, capturing a single, solitary moment in vivid, exuberant detail.

In her Inuvik CBC special, she performs this song in the Igloo Church there. That performance somehow adds even more magic to this gem of a song. The arctic surroundings, the acoustic warmth, Lights’ singing, the crowd joining in — it all just elevates the song so much that the performance sounds nothing short of transcendent to me. It truly gives me the feeling of being gathered with loved ones around a warm fireplace while a blizzard rages on outside.

Likewise, I love the vision for the official music video, which is pretty much just her walking through random locations in the city. I love lowkey videos that just involve a normal location and enjoying the moment within it — similar vibes are in the videos of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me”, “63/WDNG” by WDNG Crshrs, or Joanna Newsom’s “Sapokanikan”. Something in me gravitates more to videos that try to add magic to the mundane, imbuing an every day location with just a little bit more character.

This leads me to a quick tangent before moving onto the next song. There’s a song that Lights did well before this album that “Toes” sounds a natural progression of.

Here’s a hint: Siberia is not the first time Lights has written music about winter. Lights fans definitely know it!

Back in 2010, she made a song called “My Boots“, which personifies winter and carries a lot of that same wintery dance vibe I hear in “Toes”. The only difference now, which I’d actually say sets Siberia as a whole apart from the rest of her discography, is the abrasiveness and harshness that characterizes the album. Which isn’t to say “Toes” in particular is abrasive — it just carries a more matured edge to it which her previous work didn’t aim for, an edge further pronounced in the remainder of the album. I think with how “My Boots” came out after The Listening and before Siberia, there’s definitely a chance that song was a precursor of the aesthetics and themes she’s exploring in much richer detail here in this album.

Back to the album, I think the next song falls into the anthemic category of Lights songs, reminiscent of “Lions” and “Face Up” from The Listening. While I would place Lights’ music at this point in her career as usually capturing shimmery night-time vibes, “Banner” has this post-apocalyptic aesthetic to it in its lyrics, sound, and video that makes it stand out more among her catalog. The song sounds very dire and desperate, which the video does a great job bringing to life. I definitely get hints of Fallout and Mad Max from it. In hindsight, I can see a through-line from this song to the narratives and themes she would go on to explore in her conceptual fourth album, Skin & Earth, especially the comic book that released in tandem with it.

“Banner” and “Everybody Breaks A Glass” take a small step away from the winter theme lyrically, but sonically, they fit right in. The intensity is turned up here, the drums almost entirely covered by a coat of distortion, the synths and even the entire mix sometimes taking on a glitchy character to them (can I officially coin this sound as “pop with sharp edges”?).

Something I want to make note of here in these three songs before moving on is Lights’ lyrical style on this album. Where The Listening hit its mark employing writing that was direct and sincere, I feel Lights made a radical departure on this album, demonstrating instead this more abstract, fantastical writing style.

It’s always been something to marvel at for me. I feel like even when she’s writing what is otherwise a straight-forward love song like “Toes”, she has this abstract semiotic kind of writing. It feels like she always stops just short of saying something directly. It’s almost this gesturing, like she’s pointing towards the concept or message but not quite spelling it out, and you’re turning to look at what she’s pointing towards. There’s this feeling of not quite giving you the specificity needed to move on from the line, leaving you sitting there waiting for some form of closure to the gesturing. This is something that’s always stuck out to me about Lights’ music over the 10+ years I’ve been a fan.

There is a song from a later album that exemplifies this abstract writing the strongest, but on this album, “Everybody Breaks A Glass” is the epitome of this writing style — at times, this song gets really philosophical, which I honestly want to see so much more of in pop music. I figured I’d include an excerpt but the entire song has so much lyrical depth that I ended up deciding I’d share it all:

It's not a solid, not a soft thing
To pull the wool up like a smoke screen
Nobody does it like a prophet
It's gone before you know you lost it
There are reasons you keep your hands tied
There's certain things you shouldn't have tried
So if you gotta tell me something
You better go from the beginning

We all forget to sleep
And crash at someone’s feet
Everybody skips a beat
We let the chances pass, 
The few we held so fast,
Everybody breaks a glass

And here I'm standing in the middle
Not just a little but a hill full
Wondering how I got a head cold
Wishing I didn't know what I know
It's never been about the money
We're worthy or we are not worthy
However much you've got on your plate
You're as good as you reciprocate

We all pretend to keep our tongue out of our cheek
Everyone's the fool they seek

We all go off the track and feel for our way back
Everybody breaks a glass
Everybody breaks a glass

Somewhere perfection lies, but not for you and I
Everybody trips sometimes
When cities fall like shacks, 
Walls eventually crack
Everybody breaks a glass

To me, each line seems to relate to the line before it, but only halfway — ingraining each verse with this confounding non-sequitur, stream-of-consciousness ambiguity, which gives me enough of a gesture towards the questions being explored, without providing a concrete answer.

“Everybody Breaks A Glass” really underscores why I became a fan of Lights in the first place. I’ve been a hip hop head my whole life so lyrics are highly important to me, and Lights’ music delivers that in spades. I think coming across her music early in my life ingrained a strong feeling inside me that well-thought-out, insightful lyrics are ALWAYS welcome, no matter the song, no matter the genre. Even within a straightforward, danceable pop song, there is still space for, and value in, quality writing.

I really like the line “However much you got on your plate, you’re as good as you reciprocate”. I think sometimes for really introverted people, it’s easy for us to feel so caught up in our own machinations that we forget how we might come across to others, who don’t have all the context on our motivations and decisions — you really are only as good as what you output, regardless of intention or effort.

I would also say that “We all pretend to keep our tongue out of our cheek — everyone’s the fool they seek” might be my favorite Lights lyric. It’s so poignant, so pointed, and it has always stuck in my memory. Returning to Jungian psychology again, I feel this line speaks very cogently to ideas like shadow projection, and more broadly, the desire to judge others — sometimes what we react to so strongly when we see it in others is actually something we ourselves embody, consciously or unconsciously.

As a whole, I feel like “Everybody Breaks A Glass” might be Lights’ most heady song, and it’s packed to the brim with lines to ponder over — which again, how many pop songs could you say that about? And yet, it’s as catchy as any of them, the production as sharp and energetic, and yet still experimental. Sometimes I think of this song as the best distillation of the whole album — all of the album’s strengths and distinguishing traits are at their most visible on this song. Other times, I think of this song as the best distillation of Lights’ music as a whole — her strength as a writer on full display, yet broadcasting at the same time her penchant for innovative production choices, and still packing it all together to form something engaging and captivating.

True Isolation

“Heavy Rope” is the next song, and personally, I feel it’s one of the most underrated tracks on here. I’ve seen a lot of documentaries on Antarctic exploration, cave diving, or mountain scaling expeditions, and one of the most horrifying fears they’ve instilled in me is that singular moment where you realize you might have gambled your way to your death, and the only hope remaining is the incredibly minuscule chance that someone happens to notice and save you. “Heavy Rope” is the best I’ve seen a work of art capture this scenario.

Don't let me tumble away
Into the throes of the shadowy bay
I cling to the rock, and it's crumbling off
Toss me a heavy rope, it's a slippery slope
Come bail me out of this godforsaken precipice
Come bail me out of this godforsaken precipice

The scenery in my mind for this song is basically realizing that we might have gotten in over our heads with the expedition — we are now hanging from a frozen cliff, moments from death, awaiting rescue. Continuing the idea that each song lends a different aspect of winter, this one really drives home the feeling of isolation one would feel if they were completely alone and stranded in a harsh winter landscape. The antagonistic nature of winter at its worst is channeled in intimate detail here.

There’s a bit of a callback to the intro track I notice here: where in “Siberia”, the premise was “let’s leave our comfort and brave the wilderness and danger, we will survive as long as we are together”, “Heavy Rope” now has her separated from that person, in danger, pleading for them to come and return them to safety: “take me back to my element, I’m afraid”. Again, while I’m not 100% sure if Lights herself has confirmed this kind of overarching winter expedition concept, I nonetheless feel there is such a strong and cohesive narrative, sound, and progression to the album that I can’t shake this feeling of there being a central unifying theme. I’ve always wanted to travel to Antarctica sometime before I die, to experience the isolation, the extreme, the cold, and how untouched by humanity that landscape is — I think Siberia is the closest I’ve heard a work of art capture what I imagine Antarctica to feel like.

“Heavy Rope” is one of the most atmospheric songs on the project, the kind of song that you might not listen to just casually on a playlist but completely glues together the experience of a full-album listen. Also — THOSE BACKGROUND VOCALS! They are absolutely beautiful! Something about the way they’re delivered interacting within the mix just gives it this distant, echoing, siren-like beauty to the atmosphere that I love.

As a whole, I feel the composition on “Heavy Rope” comes across deceivingly sparse on first listen, but when you really pay attention, the sheer amount of layering in the background vocals, synths, and variations in the drums is kind of astounding. When I first heard this album, I was a broke high school student so I didn’t have quality headphones, but listening on high-end studio monitor headphones now as an adult, the compositional depth to this song just shows me how much love was put into each moment on this album.

This is one of those songs that, if I were to be a professor teaching a class to up-and-coming pop artists, I’d make them listen to this song five times and close-read it. Pop music, in my experience, can often find itself challenged by “album tracks”. For a genre that usually is focused on radio singles that can stand on their own two feet and command active attention, it can be difficult to then deliver an album that, like a great film, has pacing and variety. Each song is either a catchy single, or a ballad, but many struggle at those Jrue Holiday-like glue tracks, that pull the entire album together and put a bow on it.

But “Heavy Rope”? This is the definition of an S-Tier album track. It fleshes out the conceptual and sonic themes of the album so perfectly, without sacrificing ANYTHING. As a song that is not as hook-driven, it nonetheless manages to captivate your attention for the entire runtime. Personally, I think Lights is amazing at those catchy singles, but where she really shines is in doing these things artistically that other artists seem to falter in. “Heavy Rope” needs to be studied, analyzed, appreciated, and praised.

Warmth and Respite

With “Banner” taking us to the apocalypse wasteland, “Everybody Breaks A Glass” getting us deep in our heads, and “Heavy Rope” pulling at the very essence of survival, it’s almost a respite that the next song, “Timing Is Everything”, is more of a straight-forward, catchy pop song. The thing I’d note here on “Timing Is Everything” is that it actually shows another reason why I was drawn to Lights’ music early on — she’s a gamer! While the WoW or Oblivion references on previous songs (like “Lions”! And Banner?) might be better examples, I kinda like the cheeky Mario reference in this track (“your princess is in another castle”).

The next song, “Peace Sign”, is actually a great segue to another cool thing that people not familiar with Lights’ music should know: she’s a synth-pop artist, yeah, but after each album, she releases a follow-up which is the same album, but acoustic. And these acoustic albums are NO phone-in — they completely transform and even elevate the songs, presenting them in an entirely new light, letting the lyrics and songwriting shine further. “Peace Sign” is one where I’d say you should DEFINITELY check out the acoustic version, it’s insanely good, adding a new sense of emotion and vulnerability, and even a French verse/duet from Coeur de Pirate.

As for the original version found on this album, I do think this song is where we can hear the sound of The Listening seeping through the most. I don’t quite think this song would fit seamlessly on that album, but the main synth lead melody definitely takes me back to the one on “Quiet”. Lyrically, I want to note — with this song, that’s TWO of my favorite artists who’ve written entire songs themed around hands, hand signs, and how they can express love, hatred, and everything in between. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s wild that it’s happened twice now haha.

“Cactus In The Valley” is another heavyweight on this album when it comes to writing. It’s probably the most subdued track so far, and it really tugs at my heartstrings the way she sings the hook —

Wipe the mark of madness from my face
Show me that your love will never change
If my yesterday is a disgrace,
Tell me that you still recall my name

Gets me every time :’)

I also think the way this song is predominantly focused on her vocals and writing, lacking any flashy production flair, synth riffing, or heavy compression, allows it to stand as this warm, analog contrast amidst the frozen, electronic sound of the rest of the project. Almost like even in the dead center of a winter storm, we find a moment of respite to tap into what keeps us human — our feelings of love and connection to other people. I think this might have been the first Lights song I ever heard, and it’s no surprise I was hooked from there.

The Sound Of The Future

The next three songs, man, they’re just cool as hell. I’ve never heard stuff that sounds like this before. I think until this point the album has stuck with its theme faithfully and fleshed that idea out, but this portion of the album is where Lights really takes the opportunity to see just how far she can push the sound of this project, how creative and virtuosic she can get before wrapping it up. Almost like a metaphorical guitar solo to punctuate and elaborate on the sonic palette of this project.

“Suspension” is the most futuristic-sounding pop music my ears have ever experienced, and I love the way the different vocals layer over each other. The robotic flatness of her vocals on the hook just fits so perfectly with the electronica of the instrumentation. This song is an engineering marvel to me, I’ve taken so many notes for when I’m mixing my own music. It feels like this pot that she just keeps adding more and more sonic elements to as the song develops, until they’re all swirling together as this perfect stew of a hundred ingredients, only to be flushed all at once at the end. So much going on, and yet the mix never feels crowded or muddled — HOW?? The song title is really fitting to me, it feels like a plethora of reagents all suspended together within the same solution, a wildly reactive mixture but all still in harmony.

The chaos of the production is complemented quite well by the way the lyrics seem to defy any logical conceptions of time and space, describing a moment that is somehow measured in distance, a soul hanging by a thread suspended in air, or describing a feeling as “sky” or lacking gravity. It really feels this is a song where she let loose conceptually and fully dives into the abstruse.

Somewhere we go to kill a while
A moment continuing for miles
Stars wed overhead, you’re everywhere
Don't need anything as much
Soul shed on a thread, stranded in air
When you get too far to touch
...
Lift my spirit high when you come here
Enemy under the heel
The sky feeling I get when you’re near
I’d give up gravity to feel

The grinding, start-and-stop nature of the melodies on “Flux and Flow” also feel so new to pop music. I especially love how there seems to be this audio glitch when she sings “there are *PITS and lands” during the hook, and keeping it there in the final mix makes it sound like an intentional effect. I think it adds perfectly to the sonic texture of the album, with its overt embrace of glitchiness and distortion.

This is another song that is transformed and transmuted so superlatively on the acoustic version; the way she was able to take a song that was seemingly so defined by the interplay of electronic elements like synths and pads, and reconstruct it into a string-laden organic hymn is nothing short of masterful. I would liken it to a metallurgist taking a beautiful gold necklace, melting it down to its raw, uniform components, and then reforming it into an entirely new piece, different in form, in structure, and in aesthetic, yet made from the same base material.

“Fourth Dimension” is amazing live, there’s this one performance she did of it somewhere on Youtube that I’ve seen so, so many times, that unfortunately now seems to be lost in the annals of the internet. It was for AltarTV, and I’m able to find a lower resolution version of it now, but the original upload had an interview at the beginning, better camera angles, and better sound quality. (I wish I could find it again! Please hit me up if it resurfaces!!)

In a word, this song is just so stylish. The production is gleaming and futuristic, and the lyrics to me are another perfect example of the abstract/fantastical writing style I love so much on this project.

I could take steps in this moon and that cloud
Look at my breath and still feel the warm out
This isn't about seasons, or about rhyme and reason
Trying to be smart but my 0's and my ones
Only show starts in my toes and thumbs
Nothing adds up but agrees
You becomes us and makes three

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?? I have a decades worth of guesses, and yet, I don’t even care which of them is right! This song reminds me of why I love Aesop Rock’s lyrics too; they both give you so much to play around with in your head, holding each line up to the light and looking at it from different angles, trying to figure out what is being said and how it all fits together. Nothing adds up but agrees.

The bridge on this song lends more of the abstract scenery that’s so fun to imagine and immerse yourself in.

I'm on moons and clouds
Where worlds wrap around
I'm on moons and clouds
Where worlds wrap around

The way that bridge vocal then continuously loops in the background for the rest of the song is just compositional perfection. The hook was always a gem to me too:

Cheers, to such, an old invention
Dear, we’ve touched, the fourth dimension

I’ll eventually find better words for this years from now, but for now, isn’t that just so cool? I also love how this song doesn’t mix out the audible gasps between her vocals, and instead actively takes those gasps and turns them into a percussive element that plays throughout the outro. Took me really long to notice that, but when I did, it just made me love this song even more. For long-time Lights fans, if anything, I hope this review really pushes this song to the front of your attention, I don’t see y’all talking about “Fourth Dimension” anywhere near enough!

Together, these three songs just sound like what I’d imagine “pop from the future” to sound like, and I haven’t seen anything AFTER it that really hits the same. As I mentioned before, I think this album ends with the experimentation at the forefront. Where “Suspension” shows us just how crazy she can get with the sound, I think “Fourth Dimension” shows us just how far she can push this abstract writing style. And I think the final two songs show us how she can experiment with song structure.

The Deep End

The album is almost done, but these last two tracks are special. For anyone somehow still thinking this could be anything close to a straight-forward, run-of-the-mill pop album, these tracks render that conclusion impossible. “And Counting” slows the pace down to a crawl — it doesn’t really even have a rhythm section at all? It’s just slow, meditative vocals sung over melancholic synth pads. There’s this faint rolling army-march drum pattern that starts playing halfway through, I guess, but even that feels off-kilter and not intended to carry the pace of the song. This is a 5 minute song with no drums or bounce, on a pop album! How?!

The lyrics of the song almost read to me like a “captain’s log” type of thing, recording a traveler’s thoughts each night during an expedition:

Forty days, and counting
I'm going to sleep, 
When I wake up,
 There will be
Thirty nine 
More days left
...
Thirty days, and counting
I'm going to sleep 
When I wake up 
There will be
Twenty nine 
More days left

The song teeters out on some really sweet fading vocals, almost lulling us to sleep after this adventure of an album — but it’s got a parting gift for us.

The finale, “Day One”, is even more experimental, and even longer. It’s an 8 minute instrumental soundscape, with various synths, melodies and pads and motifs, just floating in and out. On a full album listen, this track is irreplaceable. The rest of the project took us on such wild turns sonically and thematically, this one feels like a closer that leaves us with our thoughts for a while. In the context of the winter journey of the album, this final track feels like we are sitting alone in the snow, looking at the aurora borealis dancing and fluttering above us, as these synths arpeggiate, glitch, and flutter around the stereo-scape of the song.

Some time and space to reflect.

What a finale.

And what kind of normal, sane, POP album ends with an 8 minute experimental ambient song??

I don’t think I know any other pop album that is as much an experience as this album. It feels like a concept album without directly being proposed as one. It’s a pop album without allowing itself to be limited by mass appeal. It feels like it has energetic crescendos, moments of respite, contemplation, exuberance, fear, confidence, vulnerability, beauty, and edge. It truly takes you on a ride, from place to place, feeling to feeling, mood to mood, time to time.

This is an album that, like Cilvia Demo by Isaiah Rashad, came to me unassumingly, without hype and without friends pushing it onto me, and yet, year after year, I kept listening to it. It grew more and more meaningful to me, to the point that now, when I put it on, it swells emotions and feelings within me, without fail, every time. I’ve been listening to it for over a decade now, and it hasn’t lost a single bit of its luster. It’s only gotten better and better for me. I discover new sounds and feelings every time I put it on, spurred onward to new realizations and imagery. It’s an album I’ve grown with, as has my appreciation for it, and I feel it’s grown with me too, like a fine wine maturing with age. This album is just perfect to me.

I remember being a high schooler scouring the entire internet looking for second-hand copies of this album on vinyl, and having no luck. At the time, vinyl hadn’t quite yet become this vintage collector hobby that has proliferated today, so it wasn’t surprising to have difficulty finding a copy. Then it got reprinted years later — I ended finally up owning her entire discography in physical form, from the albums down to each EP she’s put out.

Over the past decade, I would try to go back and find other reviews of this album, and it felt like there weren’t many. None of the critics I follow covered this album. And of those scant reviews that I did find tucked away on the internet, none of them felt like they appropriately captured the essence and exigence of this album, or properly appreciated it the way I appreciate it. For as many words and sounds went into this album, I wasn’t satisfied with how many words were said about it. More people should’ve been writing about it, making videos about it, discussing it on message boards. Siberia was and is an artistic triumph to me, and it warrants the utmost admiration. So when I decided to take up reviewing albums myself, the endgame was always to review Siberia, and my goal was to finally give it the due praise that I think it always deserved, and to champion the brilliance put forth on this project. I even waited to develop my writing skills to a level before writing this review, spending a year practicing by writing about other albums, so that I could feel confident that I am doing a service in representing this album.

Siberia pulls off that oh-so-difficult task of crafting a cohesive sonic aesthetic that ties the whole album together, yet somehow eschewing repetition and surprising the listener with every move. A whole album that evokes winter, with each song as varied as each day in the season. Sometimes harsh and antagonistic. Sometimes dangerous, desolate. Sometimes magical. In my opinion, this is the greatest pop album I’ve ever heard, and it is one of two albums I’d call my favorite of all time.

Lights is an immensely talented artist, and she has the trait that I personally find the most appealing in an artist: the ability to transform her sound entirely with each album. Unfortunately, this does mean she never really went back to this sound. I doubt we’ll ever get a Siberia 2 or something like that. But honestly, that’s not a bad thing. I love seeing the constant evolution in her sound, and how versatile she is as a writer and artist to be able to sink so well into each of those sounds. Every album from her has been different, and yet still drawing from that same place of talent, emotion, and honesty. I will be writing about each album in her discography, but I wanted to make sure to start with Siberia due to how much it means to me personally. I hope everyone reading this will take the time to check out those reviews when I eventually publish them. Lights’ entire discography is full of brilliant twists and turns that I think need to be explored in writing and properly appreciated among not only the pantheon of pop music, but more broadly in our discourses of what it means to be a versatile, adventurous, and authentic artist.

Siberia. 10/10. Masterpiece.