Photo by Tonje Thilesen

Too often, breakup songs focus on two points: when things were good and right when things fell apart. L’rain, the avant-pop moniker of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and art curator, Taja Cheek, redefines the narrative from a totally different timeline on “New Year’s UnResolution” where here, every second expands further and further into the future, shapeshifting what that memory now means. As the NYC-based artists’ first new music since absorbing grief and orbiting real world traumas while in pursuit of small joys to keep your own with her 2021 breakthrough, Fatigue, this listen finds L’rain once more a virtuoso of sonic therapy, using a light-layering tapestry of astral synths and loops, percolating rhythm, and voices (cosmically sent from energy spheres from the past, present and future by Angel Deradoorian, no less) that gradually envelope the space she reflects on that connection. “Do you know what it’s like to have something?,” she wonders at one point, only to look upon that same marker many moons on with a different wonderment: “Will you forget me along the way?” As the distance of her memory travels further along the recesses of time, so does its impact evolve on the way she grows forward.

L’Rain’s “New Years UnResolution’ single is available now on Mexican Summer.