Two years ago, Cate Le Bon went into the studio wanting to work on an industrial album.
“I had this image of something industrial and angular,” she shares from her home in Cardiff, Wales. “I was sidestepping, trying to outrun sitting with heartache. But I kept veering back towards what Michelangelo Dying became, and I just went, right, let’s do this, roll up my sleeves, and look this thing in the eye.”
“The thing” was the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and throughout Michelangelo Dying she writes variously with sadness, desolation, tenderness, and sometimes even the sly feelings of self-satisfaction that come in the acceptance phase. If the industrial and angular sounds she sought out at first were meant to violently tamper down her grief, there is something even more powerful about creating flickering sonic landscapes, lush and opulent, with those very same emotions.
On “Heaven Is No Feeling,” the first single from the album, Le Bon sings, “I see you watch me work for your slow hand / Draping my body with no rhythm, just desire / The day, the night, it all ends / And you smoke our love like you’ll never know violence,” the buoyant beat recalling languid dancing in dark rooms illuminated by blue and red lights.
“Making this record, everything was kind of unspooling from me in ways that maybe, in a different state of mind, I would’ve censored myself a little bit more,” Le Bon says. “It’s probably some of the most vulnerable lyrics I’ve ever written and not edited out.” On “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday),” for instance, she sings, “I thought about your mother / I hope she knows I love her”—a quietly devastating lyric, capturing all that is lost beyond the relationship itself when it’s all over.
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