Lelia’s new album Dark Disco draws you in from the title track, like being called by the vibrations of a basement nightclub and finding yourself walking down a long corridor to a set of vertiginous set of stairs. But what delights await you on the other side of the door; pulsing neon, flashes of glitter ball and the electronic heat of is a set of songs that not only get the blood pumping but illuminates many of the challenges facing women today. Lelia mixes her disco with discourse as she turns the dancefloor lasers on such issues as the male gaze and navigating the feminine image. The album has as much joy in the power of music as it does from female empowerment. The beats are infectious as Lelia’s spellbinding voice which moves easily from low and beguiling to a bold clarion call.
Joyzine was delighted that Lelia wanted to give our readers a track by track breakdown of the inspiration/meanings behind the songs on Dark Disco.
Dark Disco (Intro song)
Dark Disco is the opening intro song for the album. It’s an exploration of the vulnerability that comes with love, and that as women, we crave to be felt in an authentic way.
It lays out this manifesto which carries on through the album; a reclamation, a commitment to truth and a rejection of objectification. It’s a calling to sweating, dancing and kissing.
It features a lot of organic instruments like a piano, celesta and string samples. By juxtaposing this with growly synths, classic disco drums and fat disgusting bass sounds, it’s me attempting to hold both desire and violence at the same time.
Hair
Hair is a camp and destructive claim. It’s about rejecting everything material. If I make my hair as big as possible, then, in a nod to the film; ‘The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ (1958), I’ll destroy anything in my path in the quest to dance and be free.
The production in this song is very dance forward; I was listening to a lot of early Daft Punk like the album homework. I wanted to lean into heavily processed choices and bring in that electroclash punk sound with really heavy guitars too.
Something about the mix of clean and intentionally over processed choices and messy imperfect sounds like the guitars and vocals feels like a way of exploring this idea of beauty and the body being something that can held in these fluxing spaces of suppression and freedom. And that by having the choice itself to explore and choose can lead towards a path of freedom.
The music video is directed by Imi Lawrence. It’s this exploration into feminist performance art. We were inspired by Marina Abramovic and the early 1970s Women Liberation protests in London. We also recreated a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ where a photographer pervasively advances towards his model. We decided to flip it on its head and instead of giving in to this gross exploitation of power, I play the model and throw a chair and scream at him, reclaiming my power and subjectivity. We also burnt a male mannequin and paraded it around soho in protest, on a leash like a dog, in a nod to the work by Valerie Export.
Smash Hit
Smash Hit, the album’s first single, is the dirtiest song albeit the most direct in the message of reclamation. It poses the question; if sex is completely for me, a woman, with a female gaze, how does that look? How does empowerment really feel?
The lyrics are a bit crass, so I wanted the production to match that. There’s nothing subtle about it. It’s one of the most electronic forward songs on the album, again I was listening to a lot of 2010s NYC post-disco / electroclash scene like Peaches and Chicks On Speed.
The video directed by Imi Lawrence is an exploration of fantasy. We sat down and thought about this idea of sanctuary you find in a room when you’re getting ready to go out. We wanted to make the camp world of sexual desire, so we got all these men to dance around me topless and it was a fabulous. I was also wearing these beautiful pieces by Tuuli Turunen, she’s amazing.
Sunglasses
Sunglasses poses this question – why are you looking at me!?
I’m not alone in walking around London, taking the tube, riding the bus and having to experience all kinds of harassment. So, my quiet and personal protest was to start wearing my sunglasses everywhere. It became a form of armour. This idea kept circling in my head of poking fun at the absurdity that harassment is. I wanted to take this uncomfortable feeling and transform it into a bright track where we could let go of the fear and dance in the spirit of empowerment.
The video directed by Imi Lawrence, is a Fellini-esque carnival, with an incredible artist Coco Angelo as a mime, and all our friends dancing. We wanted it to feel like this group of young people find each other in some dark street, a traditionally unsafe place. But like the song we created it into the space of celebration.
Makeup
Similar to Sunglasses and Hair, Makeup is about this theory that appearance can be used as a tool to transform. This idea that feminine image has been used to reduce women’s power into tokens of capitalism. However now we can use devices like makeup and hair to bring us into these places where we’re subvert and transcend to empowerment.
Instead of looking at makeup as solely to enhance beauty from these rigid social stereotypes, I’m going out wearing huge dark makeup, simply because I want to, it’s smudging and that’s beautiful and I’m dancing anyways.
Repetition
Repetition was born during the time of a really painful breakup. It’s one of the more personal songs on the record. I’m trying to capture that moment when you decide to choose yourself.
Leaving is uncomfortable, but the only certainty we have of life is change, and change as growth hurts.
It puts into question themes of faith, myth, and romance. In this culture it’s easy to pedestal and make our partners deities in ways, but as I say in the song, like Elvis, can love rooted in dream be really that sustainable?
Crazy Baby
Crazy Baby is a song written for a very complex, broken, crazy man that I was with.
It explores the feeling that sometimes when you love someone, you know it’s wrong and you know better but there’s a surrendering that’s really hard to reckon with.
In an album about partying culture, I wanted to talk about the darker side; excess, drugs, and ultimately, abandoning oneself.
I wanted to lean into this super heavy, dense 90s vibe with the production, something that felt as theatrical and intense as what I experienced.
Girls Playing (Interlude)
This interlude is almost like a mantra. The word ‘girl’ has been in use to undermine women for so long. I wanted to take this word ‘girl’ and the idea of play and throw it in the face of the listener. I’m a girl and I want to play, that’s not undermining, that’s empowering. It pokes fun at the infantilisation of women and states that connecting to one’s child side can be an important and empowering thing.
Satisfy Me
Satisfy Me in my opinion is the most disco forward track. I was listening to a lot of 1970s funk and disco, like Prince and Marvin Gaye, which ended up finding itself in the production on this track.
I wanted this feeling of cool that you have when you have a new lover. You’re walking down the street, and you have a secret in the way you move.
It’s about intimacy and the abandoning inhibition. It’s almost archaic and how dramatic it is. I chose this because I find that when I have a new lover, it’s infatuating and delicious and life becomes fabulously dramatic.
Also, similar to Smash Hit, this is a really honest confession of how I desire.
The music video directed by Imi Laurence is the ultimate expression of centering female desire. The male lead, Flash, is essentially a prop throughout, that I tie up in a ring of fire. We set me loose in a field, dancing and running around with a gun, again holding desire and violence, and exploring reclamation.
Daddy
Daddy came from a situation at a music conference where a very fabulous silver fox asked me for an affair, to which I said no, BUT there was an honest part of myself that found it incredibly erotic.
Instead of being the other woman, I went to see Massive Attack at Victoria Park that night and made this song in a couple hours when I got home.
Throughout the album I’m very interested with the idea of sex and perversion being inherently linked, this song is the bluntest expression of that. Every person experiences darkness and perversion, and to truly set oneself free, I think one needs need to acknowledge and understand it. Not to necessarily act, but to know it.
I find there is an empowerment and feminist quality to admitting that, this might be wrong, I might behave badly, and my impulses are not in line with what I’m told they should be.
Discoball
Discoball is the most sentimental song on the album. I was walking down a beach in Spain for hours and my face was blinded by the sun. I kept thinking that it was like a disco ball in the way as it’s the centre of all the movement of the world.
I wanted to write a song in honour of hope; with empowerment and reclamation there must be hope. I find the world at times to be an incredibly cynical and ironic place, and the art I connect with the most I find usually has sincerity at the heart of it. I also think something radical about sincerity in a world where post modernity and the digital world as a reductive expression of the self are so culturally conscious.
The song is also a love letter to music and my own relationship and complexities with it. It’s about letting go, catharsis and destiny.
The music video, directed by Imi Laurence, was an ode to the late and great David Lynch and his beautifully strange world. We again took an older man and wanted to show hope and dance as a tool of empowerment for all. We have me parading around the streets of London again, holding this discoball almost as a pledge to lightness and optimism, and an attempt to make a positive impression of anyone who saw. I had the privilege to wear pieces from Tuuli Turunen’s latest collection, and they felt perfectly fitting.
The All New American Woman!
When I wrote The All New American Woman! I had become recently obsessed with Angelyne the Billboard Queen. I found she perfectly exemplifies this idea that the commodification of the female image is so intrinsic to western society. She became famous by posting billboards of herself, and I think that’s so fabulous.
I wanted to poke fun at old 1960s tarte cards and 1980s infomercials and the inherent language that comes with commodity. But instead of using it to sell, I used it to empower by subverting it. Instead of the female image being the object of desire I wanted to create a song where the female image is the subject with complete autonomy. So even if you’re up late and you’re behaving badly or you have bleached hair for the 10th time, you are beautiful and powerful.
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Introduction by Paul F Cook
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