{"id":524615,"date":"2026-03-09T13:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T13:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/524615\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T13:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T13:40:13","slug":"lala-lala-heaven-2-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/524615\/","title":{"rendered":"Lala Lala : Heaven 2 Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGet me out of America,\u201d Lillie West sings in the opening bars of \u201cCar Anymore,\u201d the first song on Heaven 2. \u201cSomething in the water makes me sick.\u201d She has the deadpan tone of someone who\u2019s been watching the world implode for a while, the looping keyboard melody behind her like an arrhythmia. The microplastics have already saturated her bloodstream. On her fourth album as Lala Lala<\/a>, she traverses the United States\u2019 dustiest corners to ask, personally and culturally: Chat, are we cooked?<\/p>\n

Heaven 2 marks a departure from the relative stasis of West\u2019s previous LPs, which she made while living in Chicago and released through Hardly Art. Now she\u2019s on a larger label (Sub Pop) and a peripatetic journey, and this album sounds as ranging as the places that inspired it: Taos, New Mexico; Iceland (where West lived for a couple of years); London (where she grew up); and Los Angeles (her current home). The record\u2019s propulsive synths mimic the whirr of wheels on the road, mechanized background noise for a life and a mind that won\u2019t be still.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes This Go Faster?\u201d epitomizes this sense of motion, a sunny, hazy melody with the slight queasiness of a hot car. That hungover oppression drenches the chorus: \u201cHell is the day after the party,\u201d West sings between observations. Breathless, she demands, \u201cGive us the ice, give us the glass\/Give us the song, give us the map\/Give us a car, give us the road\/Give us a raft, see if I float.\u201d It has the cadence of movie montage, a character tossing clothes into a suitcase like they\u2019re on the lam.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven Mountains Erode\u201d is another album standout, a percussive marriage of trip-hop and \u201990s-inflected pop that segues into a celestial bridge. \u201cNight on night\/Drinking poison,\u201d she reflects, before looking to the cosmos for permission to change. Change is the only constant; even mountains erode. Here, sobriety is less a stopping point than a current that might reshape the whole journey. We\u2019re with her at the river\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n

\u201cTricks\u201d loses some of this momentum, and \u201cAnywave\u201d feels falsely defiant, a wannabe anthem that never entirely convinces. These are momentary lapses. The pinging, reverberant \u201cArrow\u201d features French electro-pop band La Femme<\/a>. Porches<\/a>\u2019 Aaron Maine wrote the bridge to \u201cHeaven 2,\u201d and you can hear his particular brand of ketamine melancholy, despair mediated through a pair of blown-out speakers. As co-producer, Jay Som<\/a>\u2019s Melina Duterte foregrounds texture and dimension, balancing gloss with crunchy vocals that feel like acrylics gliding down your back.<\/p>\n

Buried inside these earworms are the kind of pearls you might mistake for truisms at first listen, but once you\u2019ve stopped running, you can dust them off and notice the profundity. \u201cHeaven is a moment\/Hell is a life,\u201d West sings a capella on the title track, a modern woman\u2019s take on Waiting for Godot. \u201cSome things take a long time\/To move to history,\u201d she opines on \u201cThis City,\u201d a succinct treatise on past and present. Somewhere between fight, flight, and acceptance, these songs squint at great cosmic mysteries through a tiny pair of sunglasses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cGet me out of America,\u201d Lillie West sings in the opening bars of \u201cCar Anymore,\u201d the first song…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-524615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}