Album Review - Lauren Lakis - Deadlights

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27 Mar

Written By James Brown

Review By: Faith Hamblyn

Artist/Band Name: Lauren Lakis

Album Name: Deadlights

Label: RidingEasy Records

Release Date: 8th May 2026

Lauren Lakis’ new album, Deadlights, caught my attention as if it was someone I went to school with, someone I used to work with; is that a Polaroid shot of a lost night of mine as the cover, with lipsticked teeth? The deadlights - that’s how Stephen King’s killer clown Pennywise gets you in its thrall, so that’s a clue that dark gems are on offer with this work, like bulky costume-jewellery rings on a hand that’s either yours or grabbing you from out of frame. Sometimes the darkest of our dreams are the most memorable, and who wants to just dance to pop music when we can stare into the indie abyss?

The album’s first single, There, is a dreamy ballad to a lost time we can never reach again, but if we remember it from now, from the future, how can we know it was ever real? ‘There’s an anger in my heart now,’ is the bridge, and it sums up how we grow from our pain, but the catharsis from now never quite covers it. It sounds like a faded, long-gone, sun-soaked summer, filled with what is home and known and comfort that we thought would last forever. If we went back, nothing would fit or seem right; it’d be like a table of rotting wedding cake in Miss Havisham’s cobwebby mansion.

Deadlights tends towards shoegaze, which is wonderfully Cocteau Twins-like, surreal and floaty, especially Heaven Felt Too High. I Fall Apart has an echoey distortion that makes Lakis’ voice into an extra form of percussion, a contrasting complement. Bright guitar and discordant Carpenters harmonies give the hooky chorus a shaky foundation. It reminds me of the heyday of the ‘00s, when TV shows tended to have theme songs much better than the actual shows.

The Other Side is like a Nirvana sister project — the drone of self-doubt and the soaring irritant of eternal hope weave on top of down-tuned melody; a dark-rock study of absolute hopelessness and the beauty it can hold, that demented mix of powerlessness and empathy. It’s So Amazing is grungey too, echoing Alice In Chains, but with a vocal like if Julee Cruise worked for David Lynch once she’d discovered the truth about Twin Peaks’ naive romanticism. The guitar is in the style of The Shadows, chiming along like lazy irony with the joyful melancholy.
Title track Deadlights is in the vein of My Bloody Valentine — the cool, cold blanket of distorted indie pop. A wall of distortion carries us along in the tractor beam of numb depression. No One’s Around Now continues the theme of being prone to your addictions. There’s no one to help, but equally, there’s not really anyone to judge; except yourself, of course.

I Want You Here might be a new version of the spirit of Wuthering Heights, like Mazzy Star, but honest and spooky and dreampop enough that you’ll need the lyrics sheet from the LP to check whether you’ve got the story right. It’s the type of dreamy ghostly entreaty where you might be summoning Heathcliff, but of course Nosferatu and Leland Palmer might be using the same radio frequency. Beautiful, languid; not at all for certain.
Closing track With That Body is the electro closing-credits music to Deadlights — a slow dance under neon lights in a nightclub at the border of a desert. It’s nostalgic, but it’s from right now; it’s cool, it’s resonant, it’s compelling.

Lauren Lakis’ new album Deadlights is a world that’s familiar and uncomfortable and otherworldly. Fuzzy guitars, whispered secrets and anthems about unreasonable pain; it feels like home.

RATING: 4 Stars