Lucy Liyou. Photo by Park Seung Won
By the time Lucy Liyou was ready to make her new album, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, she’d spent more than half a decade reckoning with the rejection that inspired it. Seven years ago, Liyou was writing songs from the perspective a closeted college student, terrified to tell her parents she was trans. When she finally came out to them, their love for her exposed itself as conditional. She’s grown significantly as an artist, expanding her repertoire to include inventive field recordings, tactile synths that can be sunken into neck deep, and a capacity for time expansion that most ambient veterans never achieve. She’s also shown a surprising knack for pop music, especially the tearjerking kind.
Recently, Liyou decided to rework and flesh out some of the fledgling songs she wrote at 19, this time in the wake of a different psychic tragedy: the dissolution of a two-year relationship. “It’s not a breakup album,” she clarifies in the album’s bio. “It’s just me doing my best to document what I’m feeling at this time.” These songs contain complex messages suspended in baths of subtext, but their medium is, for the most part, the pop ballad. They’re not entirely breakup songs, and they’re certainly no longer entreaties for parental approval. They’re fractured vessels, overflowing with love that endures even when it’s unrequited.
Three big-room melodramas comprise the album’s first half, each containing Dusty Springfield-level self-debasing lyrics, the kind one can only write after scrubbing the underside of their soul. “Please stay / Please stay / I have so much love to give, please stay,” she sings on opener “16/8,” a song that likens the mix of hope and horror one feels while waiting for a lover’s response to the rests between notes on a score. “I forget the time / Just to savor / Every anticipated measure,” she half-sings, half-croaks over lingering piano chords, so close to the mic you can hear her choking up.
On “Credit,” she explores the uglier, more transactional side of the disintegration of a great love. “Do you want me now / I hope you do,” she sings. “I’m not using this against you / I just thought that this would be something to build up my credit.” As the moldering synths below her begin to breathe harder, her voice crescendoes in a frenzied gambit, emphasizing the emotional arithmetic one throws in their partner’s face as proof that leaving would be not only cruel but illogical.
“Arrested” is the album’s arena-pop apex. As on “Credit,” shapeless synth pads grow in volume, accumulating momentum until they climax in an ultra-lush finale. “Please learn to love what I am now,” she belts, her vocals overdubbed into an Imogen Heap-style Auto-Tuned chorus as the album’s first percussion emerges from thin air — reptilian clicks, a heavy kick drum, rattled chimes. One could easily imagine this line as a prayer for a lover’s return or an entreaty to prejudiced parents, but the magnitude of its crash landing allows it to transcend these interpretations.
Every Video, Every Song’s second half hews more closely to Liyou’s previous explorations in ambient world building. Bookended by wordless pieces (or, more accurately, tracks whose lyrics are either absent or incomprehensible, so low in the mix they’re reduced to scribbled marginalia or completely buried), the four-track run is loosely structured, arranged like scattered buoys in an open sea. “Imagined Kiss,” which follows “No Tide Aorta,” contains a refrain — “Just say when,” repeated four times each at the song’s middle and end — that might act as an anchor in other circumstances; here, it floats rudderlessly. “Jokes About Marriage,” which precedes the project’s closing track, partially returns to the piano-based balladry of the LP’s A side. But rather than a climactic resolution, the song fades into oblivion, its languid synths and doleful saxophone flourishes dissolving into the sound of a light breeze blowing through a bottle tree, carrying dog barks and infant wails from some faraway town.
Aside from the pregnant pauses between songs, there isn’t much actual silence on the first six tracks of Every Video, Every Song, with soft synth pads or decaying piano notes filling most of the negative space. The pattern is broken on the album’s titular closer. The song begins with 12 seconds of jarring percussion, like the restless tapping of fingernails on a windowpane. Then, abruptly, they’re swallowed by a noiseless vacuum. The song emerges from this black hole 23 seconds later with the ring of a single chime, which itself falls into the abyss after a few moments. Quickly, the track unglues itself in time, punctuated only by a second-long soundbite here, a piano keystroke there, almost accidental in their brevity. Late in the song, as the sounds begin to cluster more closely, we get our first and only words — “Call me,” whispered slowly, as if through tears.
Lucy Liyou. Photo by Park Seung Won
In the aftermath of every personal fissure, romantic or otherwise, we hold onto the hope that what’s done can be undone, wonder what we could have done differently, wish the toothpaste could go back in the tube. Liyou has moved past the denial stage of grief, but she refuses to forget and move on. Instead, she rearranges the shards of her past and present rejections, surveying them from newer, but no more distant, perspectives.
“I named the record Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name to remind myself that the more amorphous moments I’ve shared with *you* are the moments most important to me,” Liyou writes. “Because they make me work harder to remember us as who we were together. And because that work means that there is still love for me to mine. To keep.” Even in the soul-crushing quietude of loss, love lingers.
