Lucy Liyou – Arrested

Next, we find Max’s pick rather, well, arresting…

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[7.33]Max Lewis-Clarke: I appreciate “sound artist goes pop” can be a scary set of words to hear, but aching ballad “Arrested” feels like a natural evolution of Lucy Liyou’s work to date, swapping out the extended soundscapes of “Dog Dreams” for something more direct and nakedly emotional. With its thick, atmospheric synths and yearning vocal, my instinctive touchstone was Sophie’s “Is it Cold in the Water?”, but when listening back to it this turned out to be a Mandela Effect of sorts. Sure, they achieve a similar effect but via drastically different approaches. Where Sophie’s track is a blinding whirlpool of laser synths whipping around you, pierced only by that vocal, here I picture Lucy alone in a vast, hazy darkness, spotlit and reaching out for something hopelessly far away. It’s a track that gets into the ways love can be knotty, even ugly: the way it makes you beg, the way it leads you to self-examine and pull yourself apart, the way it dredges up all your insecurities, yet it doesn’t do this in an abrasive way but plays it earnestly, not railing against the way she is being made to feel but instead simply accepting that it is that way, and the heart wants what it wants. The track layers up pillowy tones and rickety distant percussion, eventually joined by angelic piano synths that rumble like thunder as Liyou puts her voice higher in the mix than it has ever been, straining and stretching as she makes her final attempts to persuade her love to stay. And then just as it feels at its most impossible, everything swells into the beautiful group vocal of its repeated final line “please learn to love what I am now”, and whilst she is still pleading she no longer seems so alone in that void, as if there is a confidence in who she is and who she is becoming that will weather whatever the response is. It’s probably the most beautiful pop moment I heard all year.
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Ian Mathers: I do not specifically come to the Singles Jukebox blurber to be randomly emotionally devastated, but one of the amazing things about music (pop or otherwise) is that’s always the chance you’re taking every time you roll the dice.
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Nortey Dowuona: Love is a battlefield. Every time you wander onto the field it is filled with stinking, maggot ridden corpses but you walk on. There are several signs written at first in puffy paint and advertiser level printing and eventually blood and shit. You keep going. A body will move from time to time, one who is dying, reaching out and murmuring the name. You try to call around for the other person’s name and find nothing and no one who answers, you go back and the hands are cold. There are couples and throuples and entire groups all linked by their hands and legs yet their bodies still feel warm, even as some our bones. You keep going. You finally reach the other side of the field and see the fence, 36 feet high, 200 feet wide. You look up and another body drops. You pick up their wrist to test their pulse. There is one, but it is faint. A small door opens, 173 feet down. You struggle to lift the body, put the body over your shoulder and run the whole way to that door. In all this, you never realized the body has no eyes, but a nose and a mouth whimpering, “I don’t need you… I don’t need you…”
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Alfred Soto: I hate to be a grinch, but “Arrested” is a grind. The quivering vocals, shattered and reassembled, don’t convey the singer’s imposter syndrome, which I assume only because I’ve read the lyrics, a practice I dislike. If the task is to evoke a troubled mind gnawing on itself, then, well, good. I prefer an extroverted approach.
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Iain Mew: I get that the way the song unravels is meant to be the big pay-off, and the way completely new tones of voice come in is a startling effect. The thing is that I don’t feel the mush before that building to anything in particular to connect to the pay-off. So it’s just a song that takes ages to get going and then it’s over.
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Claire Davidson: Forgive me for making a potentially obvious comparison, but I hear a lot of Perfume Genius in Lucy Liyou’s DNA: both artists command moments of quaking tenderness that give way to frequently blissful, sublime crescendos, even if that beauty is often juxtaposed against upsetting subject matter. In this case, though, Liyou’s lyrics trend not towards despair but sexual ecstasy, as she seeks to be enveloped so fully by her partner’s touch that she’ll feel as if she can transcend her own form in the aftermath. That portrait of mounting, orgasmic tension is mirrored by her instrumentation, forming the track around waves of bass that seem practically tidal in their all-engulfing force, with Liyou slowing intoning her desires before contorting her voice with filters as the track begins to crest, reflecting a narrator both thrilled and terrified at the prospect of annihilation. I do wish that Liyou had refrained from pitching up her voice at this point; the choice reads as so immediately artificial that it jars the listener in an otherwise sensual track. Even that minor misstep, though, serves as the precursor to a choral climax so majestic that it has to be felt to be believed. What a striking introduction to this artist.
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