This week, them. is profiling emergent LGBTQ+ musicians whose forward-thinking work has established them as Artists to Watch. Read more from the series here.
“When would be a good time to tell mom that I’m going to therapy?” asks a strange, stilted voice on the opening track to Welfare, the 2020 album from musician Lucy Liyou. “Maybe three months from now?” a different, more high-pitched voice replies.
The words, spoken by a computerized text-to-speech reader, arise across sparse, ambient sweeps of melody and bristling synthesizer loops. These voices act out narrative conflicts like characters in a stage play, saying what often feels unspeakable, resulting in music so profoundly intimate that listening to it can almost feel like trespassing.
The 22-year-old musician takes inspiration from other boundary-glitching artists like the electronic collagist Klein, ambient experimentalist Claire Rousay, and avant-garde saxophonist Sunik Kim; their work is also inflected by the rhythms of Korean television dramas and the Korean folk opera tradition pansori. With their music, they tease out the contested boundary between individual identity and collective belonging, and the ways that both tend to inform each other and find themselves in flux.
In the summer of 2020, Liyou’s grandmother got sick with a mysterious illness (from which she is now recovering) and their mother flew to Korea to take care of her. In the stress of the weeks that followed, they composed and recorded their latest album Practice, which came out the following February. Written on the piano in their parents’ home in Washington, Practice reenacts fraught conversations among family members about love, death, and preemptive grief via a chorus of text-to-speech voices, whose digital disembodiment paradoxically enhances the emotional weight of their words.
The album’s title comes from the lyrics to the song “September 5,” a wrenching spoken-word piece featuring Liyou’s own voice, where they recall watching a television series with their grandmother as a child and promising to practice the soundtrack on piano every day. They whisper the memory’s details as if they were embedded deep within it, launched back in time to a moment of resounding love while grief shadows their present. For Liyou, composing and recording the album offered catharsis and ultimately healing, helping them process a challenging season by mapping its topography through sound.
The nerve and inventiveness of Liyou’s music has made fans of plenty of other conceptually daring musicians, notably Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, who featured their song “Some Form of Kindness” on a recent mix for Sonos radio. Over Zoom, Liyou spoke with them. about music as world-building, the alchemy of a perfect pop song, and aiming to be limitless in all that they do.
