Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Jessy Lanza charts some unfamiliar territory on her endorphin-filled fourth album, Love Hallucination, by playing the saxophone and singing about orgasms. The Canadian producer had intended for a number of her intimate new songs to be sung by other people but decided to sing them herself, describing the resulting record as her “trust fall.”
The album—the successor to 2020’s All the Time—chronicles a new chapter in Lanza’s life following a move from the Bay Area to L.A. There’s humor, heartbreak, anxiety, sex, palm trees, and plenty of iridescent club-pop. Joined by revered producers Jacques Greene, David Kennedy, Paul White, Jeremy Greenspan, and Marco “Tensnake” Niermerski, Lanza steers her sound towards a land of pop and disco. After launching with the taut percussion of nerve-shredding opener “Don’t Leave Me Now”—which Lanza wrote after getting hit by a car in L.A.—the LP cruises through the spicy 2-step of “Midnight Ontario.” Lanza continues with sexy and playful tunes like “Casino Niagara” and “Drive,” before ending with the sax-infused “Marathon,” where she sings “If I come once it’s not enough (It’s never enough)/ So show me you can run it like a marathon.” The sequinned dancefloor anthem “Limbo,” co-produced with Tensnake, is doused with a zippy humor and peppered with playful overtones. She trades in salty emotional close-ups like “Don’t Cry on My Pillow” and gets weird and beautiful on an experimental pop number about a rose bush on “Big Pink Rose.”
Love Hallucination is underscored by Lanza’s crystal-clear sense of self-awareness, giving the impression that she knows not just how to have a laugh but how to laugh at herself. Love Hallucination is the potent sound of an electronic artist at the peak of their pop powers.
