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. The industrial and angular sounds she initially sought out were meant to violently tamper down her grief, but 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 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.
Of course, Le Bon’s willingness to give herself so wholly to the music and process is what makes her such a singular artist. Her vision extends to the visuals, which for this album involve a lo-fi, picture-in-picture look—literally, both on her album cover and in her music videos, the treatment involves a rectangle in the middle of the screen. It’s a melding of past and present—of present and future—and what’s real and what isn’t. (Talking about “I Know What’s Nice,” she says, “When I’m in love or making music, when I’m in the sea, when I’m in the desert, I feel like I’m every single age and no age at all. And that’s one of the most beautiful things in life to access.”)
She was inspired also by Real Dream, an installation by Colette Lumiere, a multimedia and performance artist who came to prominence in the 1970s. In it, Lumiere lies on a bed in a hyperfeminine pink room where even the walls are draped in fabric. “I can’t remember where I first came across her work, but you know how heartache makes you restless and it makes your thoughts fragmented and you’re pinging from the future to the past to the present constantly?” she asks. “She is lying naked in a beautifully ornate, pastel-y pink woman’s room with a mirror by her side. There was something so peaceful about it. I read it as a woman who had been able to stare herself down, to look at herself, then put something down and rest. That resonated with me.” To her longtime friend Samur Khouja, who is also her producer and engineer, she said, “I want a record that sounds like this installation feels.”
As Le Bon gets ready to go on tour, she has been listening to the songs and, to her surprise, discovering things. “Lyrics that didn’t hit me as I was writing them, I understand them from a different viewpoint now, because lyrically it was all happening in real time and I was so in it, there was no moment of pulling back and looking at it,” she explains. “Sometimes I’ll write things that I don’t fully understand, but I know what they’re real.”
