The Uneasy Prophecies of Cate Le Bon

There’s a scene in Netflix’s “Too A lot” by which the heroine, an American transplant in London, listens to a playlist curated by her new British paramour. (Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe star as avatars of the present’s creators, the writer-director Lena Dunham and her husband, the musician Luis Felber.) A lover reveals himself by sharing what he loves. When Cate Le Bon’s 2013 ballad “Are You with Me Now?” started to play, I used to be as gratified as if I’d written the track myself. The monitor, breathy and earnest, is a specific favourite of mine, a tune that’s directly craving and reassuring, excellent for a present in regards to the consolation of old school romance.

Le Bon, a stage title for the forty-two-year-old Welsh musician Cate Timothy, has launched a half-dozen solo albums previously sixteen years, along with two together with her onetime companion Tim Presley, underneath the moniker DRINKS. Her music has been a continuing in my life since I first stumbled upon it, a couple of years in the past. “Are You with Me Now?” is consultant of Le Bon’s early work: the strummed guitar, the strained soprano, the candid sentiment that’s possibly about love or presumably about loss of life.

I’m keen on the artist’s folksy juvenilia, nevertheless it was her 2019 file, “Reward,” that really received me over. That work marked a decisive shift in musicianship and tone—Le Bon started deploying a deeper, nearly spoken register as a singer, whereas permitting her instrumentation to rely extra closely on eerie, synthesized sounds. Her subsequent album, “Pompeii,” from 2022, noticed this experiment proceed: the vocals are sort of languid, much less prone to pressure excessive than to slip down the dimensions, solely to have the singer maintain a notice for a couple of uneasy seconds.

This summer time, I discovered myself obsessively listening to her seventh solo album, “Michelangelo Dying.” It stored me firm on trip, as I strolled by the ocean within the mornings, and at residence, as I washed up dishes after dinner. On a protracted journey to go to my son’s sleepaway camp, I let the file play on repeat as a result of I’m afraid to fiddle with my telephone whereas driving. “Michelangelo,” with its unsettling and mournful ambiance, captured one thing about this unusual 12 months. I relished its temper of hysteria and melancholy as if I had been as soon as once more a teen mainlining the Smiths on my Sony Discman. Let’s put it this manner: if anybody ever desires to make a tv present that distills the tumultuous political, social, and environmental crises of 2025, this file could be an apt soundtrack.

As just lately as a few years in the past, Le Bon known as Joshua Tree her residence. She crafted this new work in Los Angeles, Cardiff, London, and Hydra. Perhaps that peripatetic course of accounts for the sensation that the file is speaking about the entire world as a lot as it’s in regards to the artist’s life. “Michelangelo” gives a hanging distinction to its predecessors: in lower than 20 years, we’ve witnessed an open-mike songstress morph into Laurie Anderson.

Certainly, the album that “Michelangelo Dying” jogs my memory of most is Anderson’s seminal “Large Science,” from 1982. There’s an identical cool-verging-on-blasé lyrical supply set off by animalesque saxophones. Each albums characteristic gnomic lyrical pronouncements. (“Inflexible, collapse,” Le Bon chants on the monitor “About Time,” paying homage to Anderson talk-singing, “Large Science, Hallelujah.”) And each artists leaven their sober tone with bursts of occasional sweetness, even absurdity, as when on “Heaven Is No Feeling” Le Bon intones as if the track has been interrupted by a telephone name: “Hey? / What does she need?”

I’m not the one individual to affiliate Anderson’s “Large Science” with 9/11, from its opening monitor, which particulars an air catastrophe (“We’re taking place / We’re all taking place, collectively”) to its incantatory eighth monitor, “O Superman (For Massenet),” with its chilling statement: “Right here come the planes / They’re American planes, made in America.” Listening to “Large Science” now, I’m struck by the best way that it’s a file of its time and but additionally appears to forecast, with unnerving specificity, an period many years away. That’s what a handful of artists do—seize the second, whereas predicting what lies forward.

Le Bon strikes me as equally prophetic. That high quality is in her sound greater than it’s in her language, although I nonetheless have the impulse to parse her indirect lyrics. On “Michelangelo” ’s first monitor, “Jerome,” it’s arduous to say if Le Bon is singing in regards to the saint, although it’s plain from how the singer stretches the one syllables of “cry” and “fall” for nearly 5 seconds every that this can be a lament.

At first, the album appears to be an elegy for misplaced love, handled with frankness: “Items of my coronary heart erased / And nothing’s gonna change.” Love’s disappointment is an evergreen topic, however right here it’s elevated by the idiosyncrasy of Le Bon’s sound. “Is It Price It (Pleased Birthday)?” has a distorted, anxious, lo-fi-ish synthesizer, and an air of self-flagellation: “I make jealous discuss / I break my coronary heart / Make a joke of affection / And of residing.” Nice songwriting usually depends on grammar so personal that it solely is smart to the performer. I don’t know what Le Bon means by “No collateral pleasure / No favourite son / Simply the love you gave / On the sideboard,” however I do know what to make of that previous tense.