Lara Jones has been on the Joyzine radar since 2023’s Fig EP which also gathered plaudits from 6Music’s Mary Anne Hobbs, Radio 1’s Jess Iszatt, DJ and Electronic Sound magazines. Her style of electronic dance music is not for the highly lit lasers and mirrorballs of the super-club but those word-of-mouth basement nightclubs with blacklight, pulsing fluorescents, wall-to-wall bodies and sweat running down the walls.
Her new EP Divided is another fine example of what she calls “both playful and provocative,” and whereas the Fig EP drew from themes of sex, sensuality and loss this EP is about “turning dance floor sounds into protest songs. Addressing subjects that affect us all – the highly polarised state of our politics as well as our conflicted inner and outer selves.”
Lara has given Joyzine a track by track peek behind the electronic curtain at the message behind each song on the new EP.
Binary: A dance tune about accepting yourself, others, who you wanna dance with and breaking down the gender binary! Trans right are human rights!
Lie: Vocoder led breakbeat track based around the vocal line ‘did you lie to get by’ which explores the idea of lying to yourself and those around you before coming out. It’s a tune for anybody who has ever been lied to or has felt safer lying about who they are than being who they are… I really enjoyed producing this tune, particularly designing the drum sounds.
Divided: A protest song; a raw honest response to the horrors of the war in Gaza ‘Let’s protest against this mess’– set against a brooding bass line, long anguished saxophone melodies, with tense synths and beats.
Depressed RN: Is a comment on how bleak things feel with a backdrop of continuous doom-laden news cycles and the general sadness that pervades life in Britain and across the wider western world. A sense of constant eb and flow and highs and lows that I think we feel all the more deeply as creative people as we self criticize but long for the euphoric moments.
Interlude (sad sax): a calming moment of reflection based on an improvisation on tenor saxophone.
Look (remix): A club focused remix of my track ‘Look’ that I released on my EP ‘Fig’ last year- exploring feelings of gender identity and presentation
Lara Jones socials: Instagram | YouTube | Bandcamp | Website
Introduction by Paul F Cook
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook / X / Instagram / Mailing List