Explosions of Glitter and Celebration - The Haunting World of Lonelady

On the rare occasions that I am inspired by a new band, it is often the atmosphere surrounding them that draws me in. I often use music as a three minute portal to the type of life I hanker for, or even as another stepping stone towards that life. The most generous music offers you that opportunity, and gives you space in which to invest in your own imagination. But when the world a piece of music offers is ill-defined, or overly stylized, the romance with it is inevitably short-lived. But if music stands up to scrutiny, after a period of digestion it soon becomes part of the furniture of your life.

Lonelady is the first artist for a long time to pass that test for me. In a recent interview she talked about how you when you finish a piece of work you ‘expect explosions of glitter and celebration’ but how ‘that doesn’t happen at all’. I’m starting to learn about that feeling of anti climax, when you put out a piece of work you have agonized over, only to see it inevitably caught up in the maelstrom of other new releases. She discussed how she feels dislocated from the things she sees on TV, and how her music stems from an era that in many ways is behind us. I really related to that tenuous quest for something difficult to define, that in many ways is beyond reach. Her music is evocative of Factory era Manchester, when guitars were brittle and textured, drums were spectral and the sounds of malfunctioning lifts and Manchester streets lingered behind the instruments. If there is a vein of something running through my writing I hope that it is that pursuit for vague worlds that briefly engaged in some tangential way. As someone who’s constantly looking for new links to forgotten worlds like these, I found it inspiring to read that in that respect I was not alone.