Taja Cheek does not write songs the way most people write songs. She layers them. Voice memos from her late mother, a vibraphone played by her grandfather, the hum of the F train, snatches of a Yale class on musique concrète, and at the centre of it all a voice that sounds like it is testing the air around it before committing to a note. That is L'Rain. It is one of the most patient experimental projects coming out of New York right now.
Fatigue, the 2021 Mexican Summer release that put her on the wider map, was built around grief, but to call it a grief record undersells the architecture. The whole thing functions like a building that you walk through. Doors open into rooms you didn't know existed. A choir comes in for thirty seconds and leaves before you can name the feeling. By the time you reach Two Face, the album's emotional centre, you've already been quietly preparing for it without knowing. The preparation was the album.
The R&B, jazz, noise, and pop elements in her music coexist without resolving into a synthesis. She is not a genre-blend artist in the way that phrase is often used, suggesting a kind of averaging. She is closer to a collagist who works with found emotional materials: the tools of several traditions used simultaneously, each retaining its own character, the combination producing something that none of them could produce alone.
I Killed Your Dog
I Killed Your Dog, her 2023 follow-up on Mexican Summer, traded some of that interiority for something stranger and funnier. Cheek described the album as an anti-break-up record: it takes the conventions of the break-up song and examines them with the curiosity of someone who has decided she's no longer obligated to follow the form. It's a conversation with her younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and the formal musical conventions that others have come to expect of her.
The title track is barbed. New Year's UnResolution loops a thought until the loop becomes the thought. Pet Rock is the closest she has come to a single, and it still refuses to behave. Pitchfork put it on their best-of list. Rolling Stone too. The New York Times did the same. Critical consensus is rare around music this slippery, but the slippery part is exactly what people seem to love.
The record has more freedom than Fatigue, the freedom of someone who has moved through the hardest emotional material and come out the other side with a sense of humour about what she found there. The grief of the first album made everything serious. I Killed Your Dog allows itself to be playful, bratty, diabolical, funny in the darkest register. Both modes are honest.
Time as Material
What keeps me coming back is the way she treats time. Most pop songs assume time is a metronome. L'Rain treats it like memory: elastic, loopy, sometimes skipping back two seconds for no reason at all. A passage will repeat with a slight variation and the variation arrives just early enough that you aren't sure if you imagined the difference. That uncertainty is formal, not accidental. It produces the specific feeling of trying to hold onto something that is changing as you hold it.
Her work as Artistic Director of Performance Space New York pulls in the same direction. She programs the way she composes: layered, multiple, refusing the single right reading. The institutional role and the artistic practice are continuous: both organized around the conviction that the right question is more valuable than the comfortable answer.
The cathedrals she builds come from memory because that is where all the materials are: a specific voice, a specific instrument, a specific train on a specific morning. Those are the raw materials. The architecture is her own. There is another record coming. Whenever she lands it, I'll be listening with the lights low and a notebook close.
The Mexican Summer Context
Mexican Summer as a label is one of the more interesting institutional contexts in current independent music. Founded in Brooklyn in 2008, it has developed a roster that consistently prizes the unusual over the commercially legible: Molly Nilsson, Weyes Blood, Meg Baird, and L'Rain form a catalogue that is unified not by sound but by a shared commitment to emotional seriousness and formal ambition. The label's willingness to release Fatigue, a record built around grief and collage that demanded active listening and resisted any easy categorization, was itself a statement about what they thought music could be for.
L'Rain has been with Mexican Summer through both albums and the relationship has clearly been generative. The production values on I Killed Your Dog, compared to the more home-recorded quality of Fatigue, reflect growing resources and confidence, but the formal logic and the emotional territory remain consistent. That consistency, the willingness to return to the same questions across multiple records, is what separates artists who have something to say from artists who are producing output.
The Yale musique concrète education sits underneath all of it without announcing itself. The tape techniques, the layered voicings, the willingness to treat any sound as compositional material: these are tools learned in an academic context and applied in a deeply personal one, which is exactly how formal education is most useful. The technique serves the feeling. It never dominates it.
Allastair Voss
The Performance Space New York directorship gives her institutional weight that supports the artistic practice without determining it. She programs adventurously because she makes adventurously. The two roles feed each other. The influence of her late mother runs through both albums without being announced. Voice memos, fragments, the specific texture of a particular voice on a particular day: these are the materials that become cathedrals. The process is alchemical in the precise sense: one substance transmuted into another while retaining a trace of what it was. You hear the original in the finished work if you are listening for it. Cheek is always listening for it. That listening is the practice.
