L’Rain

What kind of music does L’Rain make? That is a question that has been delightfully confounding listeners for a decade, ever since Taja Cheek released L’Rain’s self-titled debut in 2017. In just 26 minutes, Cheek shifted between Stereolab-like wonder and ecstatic gospel swallowed by static, between kaleidoscopic pop carousels and backmasked tape experiments. Her stylistic twists and turns have only multiplied in the interim, culminating in this year’s fascinating fata morgana. Any perceived gaps between soul and folk, between dance hall and shoegaze, between avant-garde intrigue and joyous play disappeared, swallowed in songs about self-defeat and self-definition. “It bridges different times, different genres, different textures, all of that,” Cheek once told Paste of the project. “That’s kind of just how my brain works, but it’s the assemblage of all of those things that makes the record.”

Cheek was raised in Brooklyn, studying dance and classically trained on several instruments before enrolling at Yale to study music. After coming back home, she started a series of auspicious art curation jobs in New York while slowly piecing together her debut. Her mother died as she worked on it, so Cheek borrowed a contraction of her name, Lorraine, for the band. “Grief now is just embedded into the project where my mother is always present and always a part of how I think about music and how I think about my art,” she told NPR ahead of her first album for Mexican Summer, 2021’s Fatigue. Indeed, every L’Rain album is about trying to overcome limitations, be they of existence or love or sanity or the record industry, where her music elides easy stylistic pigeonholes or marketing categories. Inspired by and named for an optical illusion where objects on the distant horizon seem to float, fata morgana delights in its own surrealism, with songs scrambled by circuits and children’s toys filling the space where drums or guitars might be. Cheek famously loves to call L’Rain “not jazz.” Better yet, it is exactly whatever she needs it to be.