Just when you thought the kids had buried the Beatles for good, here’s AKRIILA with lucy miró al mundo y notó que está girando. The title of the rising Chilean star’s new album (“Lucy looked at the world and noticed it’s turning”) borrows lines from “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the first song AKRIILA learned to play on the piano. The Fab Four might seem like an unlikely reference point for a flame-haired 22-year-old whose berserk debut album was filled with robotic tags, but the more you listen, the more it makes a weird kind of sense. AKRIILA makes omnivorous music, the byproduct of a peripatetic appetite and an inability or refusal to streamline her impulses. She doesn’t sound like the Beatles; she sounds like someone playing you her 10 favorite records at the same time, a charming mash of dog-eared pages and favorited tabs.
The Evolution of a Protagonist
Akri’s Lucy is not Julian Lennon’s classmate Lucy, nor LSD, nor a love interest. It’s a protagonist learning to live alone in a grown-up, lovesick world—and also, separately, a snail. Snails are pathetic, precious things, locomoting calmly as chaos erupts around them. On the album cover, AKRIILA holds a snail named Lucy as light breaks in from every side. As lucy unfolds, the record moves from the bitter depths of heartbreak to something like acceptance, or the painful death that’s necessary for the light to eventually come back. On the trip-hoppy, dream-poppy second track, “moriría y moriría,” AKRIILA threatens to shoot herself if she can’t have her sweetheart. Fast forward to the languorous ache of closer “lucy,” where AKRIILA sees a snail that’s sure to die, and she gives up; she says the world has stopped turning.
Sonic Landscapes and Digital Grit
While the album is packed with these love-scarred lyrics and angsty entreaties, you wouldn’t know it from the production, which is mostly handled by longtime collaborators Heartgaze and Vinco. Where AKRIILA’s 2024 album epistolares turbocharged Nia Archives’ sensitive jungle for a neoperreo club night, lucy uses mad thuds and speedy rhythms sparingly. The new sound is groovy guitars and drums that make being down bad sound like springtime bliss. AKRIILA cites the Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea as inspiration. This is “rock” in the slippery DAW-brained sense, where iPhone-recorded guitars are overlaid with pixelated whimpers and songs frequently short-circuit at the two-minute mark.
A Choose-Your-Own-Anxiety Adventure
It’s a zoomer’s choose-your-own-anxiety adventure: “abrázame” is gentle yet stompy, while “gemela” spins an ancient Boards of Canada sample into a soft-rock sigh of defeat. Jane Remover swaggers in for a synth-bass bop on “suave,” showcasing how Heartgaze and Vinco navigate production. It’s a petting zoo of frail bleeps and hand-me-down acoustics, where carefully plucked samples from Patti Smith and Chilean rockers Los Prisioneros link arms with umru and underscores-y lasers. While a few tracks feel undercooked or overcluttered, the highs outweigh these defects. lucy is a solid call to arms for a young generation that loves to bedrot and wallow in solitude. Take after AKRIILA and the unassuming snail: Give the world a chance, get hurt, and keep on crawling.