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. And 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.
I Killed Your Dog, her 2023 follow-up, traded some of that interiority for something stranger and funnier. 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.
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. 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.
There is another record coming. Whenever she lands it, I'll be listening with the lights low and a notebook close.
Allastair Voss
