LILY KONIGSBERG - Lily We Need To Talk Now LP (colour vinyl)

Limited edition yellow colour vinyl.

Although there are a few qualities that recur in each of Konigsberg’s projects—her cherubic voice and Arthur Russell-indebted sense of melody—for the most part, these records are tied together by Konigsberg’s polymathic musical sensibility, her ability to draw from a dozen different traditions at once.

Taking stock of her catalog reveals an artist seemingly more driven by method than style. Listening to Konigsberg’s music, I imagine the questions she might ask herself during her creative process: How can I make this odd song more immediate? Can this pop track be a little freakier? The unifying quality of Konigsberg’s various projects may be that there are no distinct aesthetic or creative boundaries.

Lily We Need to Talk Now doesn’t make any real attempt to reel in Konigsberg’s impulse towards genre fusion, but it is her most purposeful record to date, and her most accessible.

This is, loosely, a breakup record; it runs through familiar beats (you’ll never find anyone better; you need to seek help; why did we split; I’ll always love you) in surprising ways.

Unlike The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, a compilation of recent solo music, Lily We Need to Talk Now is lush and coherent, and, at 24 minutes, extremely easy to leave on repeat. Konigsberg cycles through a handful of styles—alt-pop that splits the difference between Sixpence None the Richer and Natasha Bedingfield on “Sweat Forever,” funky, ESG-indebted dance on “Alone,” crunchy pop-punk on “Bad Boy” and “Roses, Again,” bratty garage rock on “That’s The Way I Like It” and “True”—but thanks to the record’s thematic spine, the jumps never induce whiplash.