The piano-heavy pop songs, while distinctly remaining pop songs, take on a dissonant, sometimes disjointed sound. Allie X’s whole album is at once, both whimsical and dark.
I met Allie at an apartment downtown that belonged to a friend of her manager. The apartment, very clearly, was not Allie’s. There was something startling about the way Allie looked against the banality of the apartment. She was wearing an extremely elaborate outfit that was simultaneously glamorous and ugly: hair gathered on top of her head like a sculpture, eyebrows bleached, grey lipstick, face powdered white, a ruffled collar, a belt around her neck, a huge biker-style leather jacket, a long green mesh dress, black pointed shoes. Not the kind of outfit you expect someone to be wearing at a dinner table at 4:30 pm while the sun is out.
There was something similarly remarkable, unusual and dreamy, about the way she spoke. When I asked about how she came up with the title of the album, for example, she said to me that it appeared to her “out of thin air.”
When I asked her what she meant by this, across the table, she pulled out her phone and began to play a voice memo for me, the moment the title occurred to her. In the voice memo, she is playing the piano softly–crooning, experimenting. She is singing quietly and picking out notes. I couldn’t truly make out what she was saying. But then, she said it: Happiness is Going to Get You. It really did seem to appear out of nothing, the way things seemingly appear and disappear in dreams at random. Allie said that with the album, she was “ trying to create a sonic scape. . . a sort of nostalgic whirlwind through time and through my memories.”
Consistent across her clothes, her visuals, her speech, and of course her music, there is a true dreamness, an intangible quality. Because this quality tracks from her art, to the way she speaks, I understand that though there is something deeply theatrical and performed about her artistic project, it isn’t literally performative. Her project is authentic to her. And self-expression, she told me, is at the core of her artistic motivation.
I first came to Allie X through her collaboration with Mitski. Songs like Susie Save Your Love have been on many playlists I have made and received over the years. A friend once told me that Susie Save Your Love is the only Mitski song you could reasonably have sex to. It’s considerably more upbeat and less melancholy than Mitski’s other music. Allie noted, though their music is very different, she and Mitski converge in their desire to create melodramas.
“I do it because I want to be heard, and I do it because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to verbalize my feelings other than put them into songs.”
Describing herself as a “melodramatic and indulgent” person, Allie pointed to this as a big part of her desire to make music: “I do it because I want to be heard, and I do it because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to verbalize my feelings other than put them into songs.”
Being a Leo, Allie deeply identifies with this fact about herself. The definition of a Leo is thinking that, “my feelings are so important that they need to be broadcast. . . .You need to stop in your tracks to listen to me and my feelings.”
This desire not just to express herself, but to make absolutely sure that she is heard, comes across clearly in the album: the drama of her vocals, the intensity of the sounds, the height of her hair. The theatrics that seep into every part of her artistic process. And Allie does seem to be able to express herself in a full and satisfying way. There have been real moments of clarity and understanding in her personal life through her music, “ My mom, in short, said to me, ‘There’s so much about you that I don’t understand about you until I hear your songs.’”
This type of intense self-expression was also clear when discussing her musical inspirations for the album. Speaking about Happiness is Going to Get You, the artist was reluctant to give me a direct list of references, no direct names of bands or artists. Reasoning her last album, Girl with No Face, was “extremely referential,” that she spent a lot of time listening to music and getting inspired. Happiness is Going to Get You was not like that at all, she said. She distinctly wanted to try something different: “this time I felt like a vessel for something filtering through me.”
“It really feels like a shift is happening that feels beyond comprehension.” Allie said she was thinking about “ the fragility and the nostalgia of the past versus the doom and the digitization of where we are now.”
She did have some visual inspiration however when creating the album cover, which features her playing the harp on a beach inside of a giant cube, though they were all incredibly niche. The art was inspired by New Orleans Burlesque photography, as well as The Infant Marie, a Victorian piano child prodigy who Allie tried to embody. She believed the visuals fit so well in part because she had “ a Victorian face, like pale painterly, that fragile sort of thing.” Which is true, Allie is one of the only people I’ve seen pull off white face paint.
This older, Victorian aesthetic she was creating was also in part a response to the increasing unrest in our world right now: “ It really feels like a shift is happening that feels beyond comprehension.” Allie said she was thinking about “ the fragility and the nostalgia of the past versus the doom and the digitization of where we are now.” As the world becomes increasingly harsh and uncertain, technology increasingly frightening, it’s tempting to take solace in this nostalgia, to live in a world you dreamed up. “I really do try to live in my own imagination and live in art,” said Allie.
The next night, at her album release party at Rough Trade, a record store situated in the basement of Rockefeller Center, the crowd was filled with young people wearing all black, the occasional person wearing white face paint. She was doing a stripped-down show, just her and a harpsichordist.
Coming on stage, her hair was done up in a different, elaborate sculptural shape, but that was distinctly different from the updo she’d had the previous day. I had never heard a harpsichordist play, and the sound was dissonant, strange, dramatic. The venue was small, totally narrow with low ceilings, and every wall was painted with harsh black matte paint. It was the day before Halloween, and every piece of the performance felt eerie.
Having listened to the album, Allie X’s vocals were even more impressive in person, the range of what she could do. She hit big, impressive notes as she threw her head back and forth widely. Even in such a stripped-down show, Allie was putting on a true performance. When she was up there, she looked totally at ease, totally happy, sharing her world with the crowd.
Image by @monibelle courtesy of Allie X.
