From Lavaland to the cosmos: Lava La Rue’s ‘STARFACE’ is a bold, genre-defying statement of artistic intent. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.
Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Blackksocks.
Lavaland has always been a wondrous place. Full of creativity and dynamism for almost ten years now, it has been the sonic playground for Lava La Rue to establish themself as one of our most illuminating pop minds. Now, though, Lavaland has a visitor: meet STARFACE and be prepared to be transported to a new celestial plane.
After so long confounding expectations and resolutely following their creative vision, Lava La Rue’s debut album would never be just another project. It had to be a statement. ‘STARFACE’ is the culmination of an odyssey through sound and expression. “It’s like going through puberty but publicly,” begins Lava as they explain the first decade of their musical career. “I knew I wanted to be creative since I was young, so I started putting myself out when I was 16. Sometimes, I envy artists who waited until they were in their early to mid-twenties and really figured out who they were and were able to put out this fresh brand. Everyone has grown up with Lava La Rue, as I have since I was a teenager. Y’know, putting stuff on SoundCloud and dropping mixtapes. It has taken me until my mid-twenties to say I’m an adult now, and I know myself a bit better.”
Knowing themself fully is what allowed Lava to develop the concept of who STARFACE is and how they could tell their story through the sci-fi dreamscape of a 17-track album. “The whole concept and the inception of ‘STARFACE’ started almost three years ago,” explains Lava. “All my life, I’ve been leading up to wanting to put out an album. It feels more serious. If I’m connecting to a narrative, this is what I am.”
Part of the album’s story was informed by Lava’s love of fantasy and books detailing strange worlds and the people who inhabit them, like Phillip Pullman’s acclaimed 1995 book Northern Lights (also known as The Golden Compass, depending on where you are in the world). “The whole concept is young people shape-shifting,” Lava says, explaining the book’s story. “That has been me for a while especially with genre identity and musical identity,” they continue. “I embody a lot of different things because I come from an area that’s really mixed in different ethnicities and classes. I also feel that I embody that as well in being a mix of heritages and gender identities so I felt like that kind of weird shape shifting salt animal. Writing this album felt like settling into a place, and I wanted a conceptual narrative to embody that.”
Once they knew what the concept would be they started to piece together the story with the sound developing tangentially. “I knew that if I had a concept and an alter ego and storyline to follow it meant that I could be a bit less constricted in terms of committing to a specific sound as long as everything followed that storyline,” they explain. “Creating this narrative of an alien that comes down to planet Earth to understand humans meant that I was also able to explore really personal topics, like relationships and politics and pain and loss, but it allowed me to do that from the perspective of this third person and this character.”
STARFACE the alien allowed Lava to look both within themselves and at things from a wider perspective, giving the record a compelling duality. “Essentially, for every song in the record, there’s two storylines,” they say .”There’s the storyline of how it ties into the STARFACE narrative – what this alien is going through, who they’re falling in love with, their perception of politics, and there’s the storyline of my own personal experience of what I went through that inspired that song. Sometimes, when you make something that’s too self-indulgent and too personal for your situation, it can be hard for people to connect, so creating STARFACE, I wanted to open it up to this wider wondrous story people can connect to because people are also able to project their own experiences onto that character.”
Frequently, when discussing the concept of ‘STARFACE’, Lava refers to it in terms of making a film with themselves as the director. “That’s what’s important about having characters and franchises and superheroes, as the reason people connect with them is there’s a bit that people see of themselves or aspire to see of themselves in that person,” they explain passionately. “It’s important to have that to open up to the wider world to adopt it for themselves. That’s how I get the balance of making a song where I could be very literal. With some of my experiences the details are incredibly unique but the feeling and emotion of what I’m going through is universal and human. An alien is like a baby experiencing the world for the first time. It’s really good for people to project their own experiences onto that.”
The love of sci-fi and all things otherworldly is not just a handy construct to pick up and use for this album. For Lava, it’s a long time passion. “I’ve always liked the feeling of fantasy and something wider than this planet,” they say. “For a lot of people like myself, sci-fi has been a coping mechanism when the world does feel so bleak. The reason why sci-fi is great – and it’s not just, y’know, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter – is that the sci-fi aspect no one can prove is not real. No one can prove that there aren’t aliens out there. I think that it can’t be disproved because there are infinite possibilities. It is a lot more exciting and also humbling.”
“Sci-fi has been a coping mechanism when the world does feel so bleak”
Lava La Rue
Infinite possibilities is also a good way to describe Lava La Rue’s career, and it’s in full effect on the kaleidoscopic sonic rush of ‘STARFACE’, which has all the genre fluidity of their best work aligned with their sharpest songwriting and a more expansive sound. It’s replete with orchestras, strings and the funkiest sounds they’ve ever produced on deep funk jams like ‘Push N Shuv’, as well as classic Beatles-style songwriting on timeless melodic nuggets like ‘Shell Of You’. A lot of the highlights of the album come from Lava’s work with collaborators like Tendai, Cuco, Audrey Nina, Feux and bb Sway, as Lava again emphasise the movie-making aspect with the comparison of a director assigning different roles or, as they endearingly put it, “It’s been really fun assembling my crew on my spaceship for each episode.”
The features all came about organically rather than being part of one predetermined plan with Lava relying on instinct to spot something or someone special. “I’m enjoying the skill and the ability to be like, I’ve just heard this amazing record, and I’m obsessed with who that drummer is. I’m just going to DM them on Instagram right now and ask if you can come on my record? I’ve called in a lot of people in that way. I was so impressed by how every feature was someone I was organically connected to in some way. I didn’t need to rely on Dirty Hit to pick up the phone; it was just people I met out and about randomly who were all incredible artists.”
One of the features was always going to be present, though, and ‘Fluorescent’ features her OG crew NiNE8 Collective. Going right back to the start, ‘STARFACE’ was bubbling up in Lava’s mind, inspired by what they were doing within the collective. “NiNE8 has been there since the start, since we were 16. It’s coming up to 10 years since we started,” they explain proudly. “What people might not realise is how many things I have been saving for my debut album. I’ve never put out a song by Lava La Rue featuring NiNE8, ever. That’s because there have been so many moments I decided to save for the album. The song ‘Push n Shuv’ is something I made years and years ago. I made it the same week I made old singles like ‘Magpie’.”
The album is Lava’s most ambitious work yet in a career full of invention. “I was trying to push myself with a lot of the songs,” they reveal. “The narrative is there, so I could lean into elements of a more funkadelic vibe and lean into elements where it’s way more alternative and grungy. Even though there’s a big range of genres there’s still a consistent sound. It’s all very psychedelic. A lot of it was made in the same studio on the same equipment. The same Moog or Juno synth. You can hear that the texture is the same.”
The album brings to mind other similarly visionary artists who know exactly what they want to do and adapt it to any sound or style. “Prince is someone where you could never say, ‘Prince was just R&B’ or ‘Prince was just rock’n’roll’,” they say, citing a key influence. “Like all great artists, Prince is just Prince. Andre 3000 is Andre 3000. With some artists it’s the artist themselves you want to follow no matter the genre and the sound is still so clear.”
Photos credit: Blackksocks.
“There have been so many moments I decided to save for the album”
Lava La Rue
As an extension of Lavaland, the ‘STARFACE’ universe is one where Lava is equally involved in the visual direction of the project. “That’s just as much a part for me as making the music,” they enthuse. “I’ve been just as hands-on in the visuals and directorial aspect as I have for making the music. I want so much of the ‘STARFACE’ world to be an experience and for that to carry on into the live shows and the live immersive experiences. There’s definitely a lot of things to look forward to around the album. It will go from being in your ears to being on your screen to being in real life and seeing and feeling and experiencing it. Even when it comes to merch, I wanted every single person who listens to the record to be able to wear the STARFACE uniform that I wear on the back cover of the album. Every element of it is like a STARFACE franchise.”
If STARFACE is a franchise then, is this first album the beginning of their journey, or might we see STARFACE potentially be killed off like David Bowie eventually did with his iconic pop creation Ziggy Stardust? It’s a question Lava has been pondering. “It’s more like an alter ego and a character for this season,” they answer intriguingly. “One thing I wanted to do is if you follow the storyline of the record, the final song leaves STARFACE’s character an ultimatum. There are two decisions of what their fate might be. I love the idea of really wanting the listeners to decide what happens next with this character. Something that really changed the way I thought was when Black Mirror released an interactive episode where you decided the fate of the character and when I realised that was possible I was like oh my god, imagine what that’s like in album form.”
The choose your own adventure comparison is an apt for an album that allows you to wander off in all manner of sonic and spiritual flights of fantasy as the STARFACE character finds their way in a strange land just like we are all doing in a conflicted and confounding world that feels increasingly in a way more alien every day. It’s the work of artists like Lava La Rue though, that continue to give you hope as they shine a path towards freedom, expressions and the belief that truly anything is possible. ■
Lava La Rue’s album ‘STARFACE’ is out now. Follow Dork’s PLAY Spotify playlist here.
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