Longing is an emotion generated by absence, which makes it tricky to convey well in pop songs. When rendered with economy, on a song like Madonna's "Live to Tell," longing becomes part of the atmosphere, something unspoken that is too subtle and subatomic to see. When it's blown up to become the only feeling a in a song, it becomes alienating: Adele songs, for example, sometimes feel like vast deserts of longing in which she is the sole inhabitant.
19-year-old British musician Låpsley combines something of both approaches. Her work, a kind of shimmering synth-pop that also inherits its more reptilian rhythms from trip hop, attracted the notice of the BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac in 2014, who invited her to contribute to a compilation. Now, Låpsley (full name Holly Låpsley Flesher) has been signed to XL Recordings, and her debut album for them expands on the crisp flutterings of her early EPs. Her music tends to be subtle in texture but direct in composition; “Hurt Me,” one of the singles from her debut album Long Way Home, is an adult contemporary pop ballad packaged in a glittering exoskeleton. It unfolds in discrete cellular units, like most songs on her record; a piano, a finger snap, the muted pulse of a kick drum, which eventually combine and flower into a small terrarium. Her vocal moves through this environment with the kind of sublimated warmth that powers Sade records and her many lesser imitators.
The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal. Låpsley’s thick, gelatinous voice is ostensibly intended to seal these isolated textures together, and she makes “Hurt Me” work almost despite itself; the melodrama of her vocal contrasts so much with the percussive decay of the backing track that it feels faintly violent. The song sounds both intimate and enormous as a result. “Operator (He Doesn’t Call Me)” employs the retrofuturism of disco and then refracts it through a second nostalgic lens, a sample of the 1975 Manhattan Transfer gospel single “Operator.” Here Låpsley’s sense of space benefits the song; the sample and the light, rolling disco collide at odd, interesting angles, like light passing through glass.
But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once. Strangely, the most exciting songs on the record are both the oldest and most shapeless. On “Station,” Låpsley’s voice is processed at three different speeds, and all three vocals are arranged so that it seems she’s interacting and harmonizing with three different versions of herself. “Painter” resembles the frozen swirl inside a single marble. Both songs resist verses and choruses; instead they inhabit a central melodic idea until it is sufficiently complicated, then abandon it, while the remainder of the track drains gently away. These songs are her most direct expressions of longing, a form of desire that can be aesthetically assumed and discarded, but which is a vast and illegible universe of feeling when fallen into.
