All of the praise is deserved for an artist who evades a concrete definition amid a press spin cycle that so very much wants to define what they hear, and Taja Cheek has successfully managed to do so throughout her artwork as L’Rain. At the very least, experimentalist impulses are always on the threshold of what the Brooklyn songwriter creates, but with her latest effort, I Killed Your Dog, the presence of guitar rock texturizing her sound might make it easy to smear her newest work as being subversively a nod to alternative music excavation more so than it did on the collage board of mood-driven rhythms texturizing her 2021 breakthrough, Fatigue.

It may be that, but only in part (the psychedelic garage rock melt of “Pet Rock”, the grotesque dream-pop of “I Hate My Best Friends”, and the electric squalor of “Uncertainty Principal”, in particular) as her third studio effort otherwise plays out like a cognitive deconstructive sequence of surreal synapses between past selves and present bodies of mind that distorts the finesse of contemporary pop (think Ariana on a post-breakup hallucinogenic trip intended for enlightened healing on “I Killed Your Dog”) and heady, cosmic jazz-R&B (“Our Funeral”, “Knead Bee”) just as well.

Collectively, the interconnect between the disconnect of her own complex emotions surrounding pain — be it inflicted or absorbed — double as a sonic mirror piecing the experiences one endures together in a multi-facet. This life is never just black or white, dark nor light, and on I Killed Your Dog, love’s macabre as well the betterment of understanding the self’s relation it all exist on the same plane.

Highlights: “I Killed Your Dog”, “Uncertainty Principal”, “New Year’s UnResolution”

L’Rain’s I Killed Your Dog will be released October 13th on Mexican Summer.

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