For an album named after a paradise in the sky, Heaven 2 spends a remarkable amount of time in the dirt. Lillie West licks it off her teeth on the closer, drives past piles of it on the opener, buries her hands in it on “Anywave,” and tries to shake it off on “This City.” Dirt shows up in nearly half the tracklist—as geography, as metaphor, as the residue that won’t wash off no matter how many cities you flee to. It’s a fitting fixation for an artist who spent the years between records living off-grid in Taos, decamping to an Icelandic fishing village where the sun never rose in winter, releasing an ambient instrumental album, and eventually landing in L.A., where she fell in love and, somewhat to her own surprise, stayed. “Wherever you go, there you are,” West has said of the realization. “I wish there was a cooler way to say that.”
That restlessness is the engine of Heaven 2, Lala Lala’s fourth album and Sub Pop debut, and her most sonically ambitious effort to date. Co-produced with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, the record swaps out the scrappy indie-rock guitar of The Lamb and the synth-pop pivots of I Want the Door to Open for something sleeker and more electronic: trip-hop grooves, rubbery bass, layers of synthesizer that shimmer and churn in equal measure. Duterte and West performed nearly every instrument themselves, and you can hear the tightness of that partnership in the production, which is muscular and intuitive—knowing exactly when to let a texture breathe and when to let it swallow the room.
When that instinct connects with a strong melody or a lyric that cuts, the results are genuinely thrilling. But Heaven 2 has a bit of a blurring problem: the electronic palette, so striking in its best moments, tends to settle into a mid-tempo wash that smooths the edges between songs; the writing, meanwhile, leans more aphoristic and less specific than on past records, trading the lived-in detail of The Lamb and the almost-childlike bluntness of Sleepyhead’s observations for broader existential gestures that don’t always land with the same weight. Neither issue is fatal on its own, but together they create a record that’s easier to admire in its architecture than to feel in your bones—the highs are high, and the lows really aren’t that low, but the middle does sometimes sag.
The best songs solve the blurring problem by force of personality. Opener “Car Anymore” is the most immediately distinctive thing here: it opens with an addictively clashy, agitated piano figure that sounds like it’s being played slightly too fast for the room, West’s low, unaffected drawl riding over it like she’s narrating a fantasized getaway she can’t quite commit to. When Duterte’s percussion and Sen Morimoto‘s saxophone bleed in around the edges of the piano riff and the low synth hum, the song starts to feel genuinely ascendant—there’s a tension in it, the kind that lives in the body. It feels like it ought to play in a movie while the protagonist stares at an airport gate, unsure whether to board. “Get me out of America / Something in the water makes me sick,” she half-whispers, and you believe her.
At the other end of the record, “Wyoming Dirt” earns its slow-burn closer status through sheer restraint: sparse held notes from West hover above a canyon of faint electronic hum, synths building beneath her until a beat finally arrives, unhurried, to carry lines like “I caught you for a second but I have to let you free / You cannot hold a flame as it moves across a screen” toward their inevitable, bittersweet destination. And “Does This Go Faster?” is simply the album’s most undeniable pop moment, its chorus—”Nothing on earth is free / Even in ecstasy / Hell is the day after the party”—lodging itself in your skull with the ruthless efficiency of a late-’90s radio single. The way West’s voice lifts and dips through the melody sells it; the way the track strips down to just two interweaving vocal lines at the end, the chorus and a murmured counter-thought (“I was meant to dissolve into / Lose it all and start again new”), gives it this utterly transcendent structural payoff.
That midsection, though, is a bit of a lull. “Scammer” floats in on gurgling synths and a doubled, cloudy vocal, but the melody seems to arrive from nowhere and depart the same way; there’s no instrumental bedrock to anchor it, just texture hovering in search of a song. “Even Mountains Erode” fares better—its trip-hop drum groove is sturdy, and West’s shift from a talk-sing murmur in the verses to a hazy, airy head-voice in the chorus is a smart dynamic choice, although I reckon the electro-waterlogged acoustics-and-strings number “Tricks” does it a little more interestingly—but the song still feels more like a mood than a moment, its impact dissipating the second it ends.
The title track, meanwhile, wants to be the album’s centerpiece, and its massive instrumental outro—a grating, cathartic synth blare grinding against a slow drumbeat, the whole thing ascending like some kind of electronic rapture—almost gets it there. But it has to survive its own lyrics first, and “Heaven is a moment / Hell is a life / I’m forever broken” reads less like hard-won devastation than furious scribbles in an angsty high-schooler’s journal. (West herself has called the song “very melodramatic,” which: yes.) Most of the hard-hitters are similarly vague: “Do you feel it? / There’s a reason / I don’t give up till the last drop” on “Scammer,” or “Been up so long, I can’t come down” on “Anywave.” As much as I sonically enjoyed “Tricks,” its final lines fall prey to the same habit: “Don’t know how to find it / Something that I missed.” The same goes for “Does This Go Faster?”, which revolves around the dorm-room-poster-esque mantra “Hell is the day after the party.” West isn’t writing badly, of course; she’s simply writing broadly. But on a record this sonically polished and gauzily produced, the gap between the gleaming architecture and the more obtuse furniture inside it becomes harder to ignore.
This isn’t to say, though, that the lyricism suffers across the board: the La Femme-sampling, electro-pop-propelled “Arrow” is responsible for some highlights—she sings “This rock in my mouth was also in yours” at one point; “You are a lake I’m dipping my hand in / Try not to drown but it’s pulling my limbs in” at another. “This City,” one of the more rock-inflected tracks on the record, with bass and guitar audible beneath steamhorn-like synth blasts and another welcome Morimoto sax appearance, also traffics more in specific imagery than much of the album: ”Ice is temporary / Like my handprint on the ground / The imprint on your back / Your lost dog never found.”When West writes like that—concrete, tactile, a little bit strange—you can feel the difference immediately; the detail gives the production something to grip (even when the production there might itself be less interesting than at other points on the record) and the songs stop floating and start finding purchase.
But even where individual songs blur, the record’s broader arc holds shape. Heaven 2 is, at its core, a document of someone trying to stop running long enough to figure out whether she even wants to stop—and then running a little more, just in case. That push-pull is built into the sequencing: the album opens with “Get me out of America” and closes with “I always leave a place / I always leave somebody in the dirt” (a brutally perfect closing couplet), and what falls between is less a journey from flight to acceptance than a restless oscillation between the two, the needle swinging back and forth without ever settling. West doesn’t arrive at peace so much as she arrives at pattern recognition . On “Does This Go Faster?” she catalogs the itch in a volley of unanswered questions—”Am I in it? / Does this go faster? / Is this even on? / Is this what matters?”—before conceding “I don’t live here, I don’t live anywhere / It’s a choice I made, I was prepared.” She admits it point-blank on “This City,” too: “I can leave this city / But I don’t get very far.” And the Duterte-West production partnership, for all its occasional tendency toward midtempo sameness, does give that interiority a real atmosphere—the synths settling into something warm and patient on “Wyoming Dirt,” the grating catharsis of the title track’s outro, the pregnant pause in “Anywave” that bursts into electronics after.
West has said that Heaven 2 would be perfectly appropriate to box to, and there is something pugilistic about the record—not really in its sound, which is mostly too gauzy for a fight, but in its stance: fists up, feet moving, never quite standing still long enough to get hit. The album’s heaven is, as the title track admits, just a moment; the rest is a life, which is to say the rest is mess and motion and soil you can’t shake from your shoes. Heaven 2 doesn’t always make that mess vivid enough to feel like yours—it’s a record you sometimes admire from a slight remove, through a scrim of reverb and aphorism. But when West drops low enough to touch the ground, to lick the dirt off her teeth or press her hands into the earth, she finds something the synths alone can’t manufacture: the weight of actually being somewhere, even if she’s already thinking about leaving. [Sub Pop]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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