Chris is gentle and tough, masculine and feminine, subtle and direct, a pop singer with high-art ambitions. La vita nuova, a five-song EP and its accompanying short film, is about the psychic effort required to maintain the balance. On the cover, Chris appears pensive, part Ziggy Stardust, part Degas portrait. She calls it a project about vulnerability, though it’s also about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark her as a true star.
If you’re looking for the party, you’re in the wrong place: Shorter and sadder than 2018’s Chris, La vita nuova has fewer big synth swoops and slower tempos. Produced by Chris alongside debut album collaborator Ash Workman, its cool, aquatic surface ripples with subtle vocal manipulations and whispery background samples. “People, I’ve been sad” is an open apology to a world its author can’t bear to face, like a note from the friend who misses you but still won’t return your calls. “You know the feeling,” Chris offers, opening a door within herself to reveal a mirror.
Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages. Last year was the year of “Gone,” Chris and Charli XCX’s duet about sadness and sexual tension; the Caroline Polachek duet “La vita nuova” is a worthy successor. Their verses in Italian are a mutual affirmation of passion, but the chorus, in English, mourns the partner who won’t dare to show their love. “Heartbreakers,” Chris cries, “I never take their answer for sure.”
Throughout, she seems like someone who’s just emerged from a breakup, still sorting through the raw emotion. “Do you think there’s only one thing to do/To write a song about you?” she asks on “Mountains,” a wistful sketch of a lapsed connection. Other times her stance is not so clear-cut: Perhaps the selfish, possessive lover she addresses in “Je disparais dans tes bras” is not a lover, but the flattening gaze of fame—not merely the pain of unrequited love, but of the impossibility of being her full self in the eyes of others.
Most spectacular is the accompanying short film, a five-song music-video narrative set in Paris’ sumptuous Palais Garnier opera house. Directed by Colin Solal Cardo, the story is a supernatural drama of a performer’s life, following Chris through a rooftop dance solo and a group rehearsal to a climactic vampire ball that pairs her with Polachek for a lusty duet. Chris appears in virginal white and then in shiny black pleather, a heavily symbolic heroine uniting the sacred and profane.
It is astounding to watch Chris’ particular vision play out in this location—a genre iconoclast defining her own scene in a lavish 19th-century Parisian theater. It recalls a story from her youth that she relayed to The Guardian a few years ago, how once, at drama school where only boys were permitted to direct plays, she defied the administration by staging her own. With its Thriller-esque flash and tomato-red fake blood, the film La vita nuova looks like a kind of theater-kid fever dream. But that’s what theater is for: The emotions that feel too unruly, too ambiguous, to survive in the real world. They need space, just as dancers do, and Chris’ could fill the house.
Buy: Rough Trade
