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 like “Hot gays listen to AKRIILA” and “Hot twinks listen to AKRIILA.” 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.
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” (“I would die and die”), 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. “Ya no sé por qué aún me esfuerzo,” (“I don’t know why I still try”), she sighs.
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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, saving a “Think” break for a sick flash on “un <3 inestable.” The new sound is groovy guitars and drums that make being down bad sound like springtime bliss, like crying and smiling while watching the sunrise say hiii. AKRIILA cites the Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea as inspo; younger ears might hear digi-rockers like yeule or Her New Knife. 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. It’s rock that sounds like a timeless, placeless composite of all the preceding phases: not indie, not punk, not grunge, but the flavors are all intact and the laptop is simulating grit and dimension.
