Ma dudes, I can’t do this again, how many more thousands of words do all your leeches need from me explaining how much I fucking adore Lava La Rue? They are one of the most exciting, most vibrant, most dang essential up and coming artists in this early stages of the 2020s we somehow find ourselves encased within.
‘High Fidelity’ is more excellence, and subsequently also works as a quick cheat sheet if you want an eighteen minute primer on why Lava’s multi-influenced, energetic yet always vulnerable, ethereal takes on queer romance make them such a pant-wettingly exciting prospect for defining the next decade or so of British music.
The latest EP’s name comes as a retort to them apparently being widely described as ‘lo-fi rap’ in some circles. Which, OK, ‘some circles’, you do you, but I can’t imagine it being possible to listen to the kaleidoscopic psyche rap of ‘Butter-Fly’ and think “Yep. Lo-Fi”, but I guess we have to also consider idiots’ impressions as also being valid these days. Whatever, LaRue aims to completely invalidate those ideas, creating a more polished record that frequently takes its cues from modern funk and R&B, with more obvious synth and funk influences (“If I make something sound lo-fi, it’s intentional”. Burn!!).
As a record, it doesn’t condemn me quite so mercilessly to ‘The Feels™’ as ‘Butter-Fly’ did, but that’s almost an unfair comparison, as I can’t remember any five track EP hitting so hard and so frequently as ‘Butter-Fly’ does. And anyway, this is almost an admitted transitional record -““I want to drop one last project that acts as the bridge between the Lava that debuted, the one everyone knows, and the person I’m becoming” – so just think how motherfucking good this motherfucker gonna motherfucking get! And despite ‘High Fidelity’s… highs… I feel that a certain standalone single showcased LaRue’s best 2022 work, and one we’ll talk about more when we finally get to the 2022 Legit Bosses (likely late autumn 2025).
Did I say I like it? I like it.
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