Lou Roy’s debut album Pure Chaos might well be a little magical. The LA singer-songwriter, 29, had been getting deep into chaos magic, and she found that embracing the forces of chaos worked pretty well for her art.
“I was waking up and the first thing I did was a banishing ritual, where you basically cleanse your energy and banish any foul forces away from you. And I was writing down things on little pieces of paper and jerking off onto them, and that’s a part of it…” she remembers with a grin. On the album’s opening track and lead single “Valkyrie”, Roy sings: “Chaos reigns, all is permitted” — a reference to a core tenet of chaos magic. “I found that to be such a profound little couplet, because it gave me creative freedom. There’s nothing that I can do wrong; everything that I could do is okay.” She used that newfound liberation to create an extraordinary debut; one where unconventional musical constructions and irreverent lyrical ideas add up to a rousing celebration of life.
Roy, who’s been in love with music since she was a kid, hasn’t always felt so free. By 2019, a bad music industry experience had left her feeling chewed up and spit out. “I was so low, and my confidence and self-esteem were absolutely in the toilet,” she remembers.
When the pandemic arrived, Roy was in the midst of a breakup, and was newly living alone. The sudden enforced downtime was a relief; for the first few months, she relaxed, focusing on nothing but gardening and cooking homemade meals. It was after this that she was ready to write Pure Chaos. Songs often began in her kitchen, with something as simple as tapping on a bottle or on her own body. Her openness to anything led them where they needed to go.
For the first time, Roy allowed herself to explore a decade-old sexual assault trauma, and face the myriad ways it had seeped into her life. “Almost every song dips a toe into the perspective of dealing with that trauma,” she explains. Yet also for the first time, there was a lightness and a sense of fun to Roy’s songwriting, even while treading such painful ground — something she credits to her newfound love of weed. “These are my favourite batch of songs that I’ve written because, [while] they punch and they’re deep and they’re really sad at points, I was proud that the language is just kinda silly.”
She took her budding album to producer Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, where they worked on it in a COVID bubble. Tudzin’s support, both behind the boards and as Roy’s friend, helped Roy to even further let go of her inhibitions around songwriting. “I’d been approaching songwriting in a fear and shame and guilt-based way, that’s like, if every line is not awesome and perfect, then I’m a piece of shit and it’s not worth approaching,” says Roy. “And so I got a little free-er with everything, and let myself do stuff that was ‘bad’.” Together — along with Sam Wilkes (bass), Kyle Crane (drums) and Eric Radloff (guitars/synths) — they crafted an album that arranged pop joy, folk introspection and rock passion around Roy’s singular voice, creating a blend that, in their hands, felt entirely natural. “Genre is tough, I don’t like it, and it makes me feel crazy,” Roy emphasizes.
On the silky, self-empowering “Valkyrie”, which is built around little more than percussion and harmonies yet sounds teeming with life, and “Uppercut”, an alt-folk stomper that’s an ode to resiliency and friendship, Roy was channeling the feeling of riding in a convertible with the top down — an uncomplicated, undemanding joy. Synthier cuts like “U.D.I.D.” and “Down Since ’07”, meanwhile, get atmospheric, pulsing with steady confidence. The all-encompassing spirit of the album is evident in the transition from “If We Were Strangers”, an acoustic ballad where Roy heartbreakingly reflects on her strained relationship with her parents, to “Myth”, a pop banger about queer belonging and great sex.
On the track “Big Anvil”, Lou promises ‘endless hope for the future’, and it’s this that, in all its chaos, Pure Chaos really stands for. “People say that it takes a really long time to sound like yourself, and for me that’s been totally true,” Roy reflects. “I’ve been so heartbroken about my career for so long, because I felt like a failure, and I was so disheartened. To resurface as a person familiar with their artistic voice and confident in the music is like, a total miracle to me. I’m just so excited about finally feeling like I can present honestly, and with joy.” Whether Roy’s rituals paid off or not, there’s no denying there’s magic to be found here.
