In the last year, in and around Hamilton, Ontario, billboards have been posted around roads warning residents about the danger of the carcinogenic element radon in their homes. The billboard showed a hellish crack in the ground oozing a toxic green light. Jessy Lanza started seeing these advertisements right around the time she moved into her co-producer Jeremy Greenspan’s (of Junior Boys) home to write her sophomore album *Oh No. *She was also convinced right around the same time, that the air quality in their shared home was poisonous. In order to fight the incoming entropy, she surrounded herself with tropical plants to clean the air, and she completed an album that recycled the bad voodoo into something remarkably generative and self-assured.
She told the FADER that in general she’s “always thinking of ways to alleviate waking up every day and feeling a deep sense of dread.” Oh No in its own way is about harnessing anxiety and estrangement—imagining how all of her bundles of pent-up nervous energy could be harnessed into a productive flow. The music here is what happens when you turn that faucet on and let all the power just stream out. *Oh No *is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects. Or as Lindsay Zoladz once wrote, music in this mode is not exactly “sadness” but an expression of a “particular kind of strength—one that allows the contradictions, complexity, and emotional range of a lived experience.”
In the last three years since her debut, Pull My Hair Back, it's obvious by just listening to this album that both her singing and production efforts have matured exponentially. The songs are freewheeling collages of '90s R&B, Chicago footwork, acid house, disco, and wonky minimalist pop, using simple instrumentation to span multiple moods and BPMs. Meanwhile, Lanza’s singing works overtime, lifting boulders and throwing them across city blocks. Her lyrics are blunt and straightforward, but her singing allows her to imbue even the most casual and static of statements with a sense of devastating irony. For example in “Going Somewhere” she treats pandering and all its silent erosion with subtle shifts in phrasing, hiccuping in the middle of lines like “Say you love me” and “Baby I just want to impress you" as if she was almost giggling at the thought.
The exhortations of hurt in Lanza’s songs are not coming from the perspective of someone sulking over their wounds, but a place of triumphant reclamation. The production and her singing on this album reach full symmetry in the album’s centerpiece, “It Means I Love You.” It’s a frenetic blend of footwork surrounding a supine ballad of loss. It tastefully samples a tabla beat from a South African song, and swaddles this percussion in slashing synths. Her voice carries along with the instrumentation in a deathly shadow dance, mimicking its jerky changes in tempo and pitch effortlessly. It all stops just for a moment when she tells the listener, and the beloved, to look into her eyes, because that's when you it means she loves you. In that pocket of seconds, it feels like you’ve been turned into stone.
