“Get me out of America,” Lillie West sings in the opening bars of “Car Anymore,” the first song on Heaven 2. “Something in the water makes me sick.” She has the deadpan tone of someone who’s 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, she traverses the United States’ dustiest corners to ask, personally and culturally: Chat, are we cooked?
Heaven 2 marks a departure from the relative stasis of West’s previous LPs, which she made while living in Chicago and released through Hardly Art. Now she’s 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’s propulsive synths mimic the whirr of wheels on the road, mechanized background noise for a life and a mind that won’t be still.
“Does This Go Faster?” epitomizes this sense of motion, a sunny, hazy melody with the slight queasiness of a hot car. That hungover oppression drenches the chorus: “Hell is the day after the party,” West sings between observations. Breathless, she demands, “Give 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.” It has the cadence of movie montage, a character tossing clothes into a suitcase like they’re on the lam.
“Even Mountains Erode” is another album standout, a percussive marriage of trip-hop and ’90s-inflected pop that segues into a celestial bridge. “Night on night/Drinking poison,” 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’re with her at the river’s edge.
“Tricks” loses some of this momentum, and “Anywave” feels falsely defiant, a wannabe anthem that never entirely convinces. These are momentary lapses. The pinging, reverberant “Arrow” features French electro-pop band La Femme. Porches’ Aaron Maine wrote the bridge to “Heaven 2,” and you can hear his particular brand of ketamine melancholy, despair mediated through a pair of blown-out speakers. As co-producer, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte foregrounds texture and dimension, balancing gloss with crunchy vocals that feel like acrylics gliding down your back.
Buried inside these earworms are the kind of pearls you might mistake for truisms at first listen, but once you’ve stopped running, you can dust them off and notice the profundity. “Heaven is a moment/Hell is a life,” West sings a capella on the title track, a modern woman’s take on Waiting for Godot. “Some things take a long time/To move to history,” she opines on “This City,” 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.
