Lillie West spent twelve weeks in a fishing town on Iceland's east coast with a population of 676, learning to forge a knife, backpacking through a blizzard and hosting a dinner party built around lyme grass. She also made a record.
It is not the record anyone was expecting from her.
As Lala Lala, West built her name inside Chicago's DIY circuit after moving there at eighteen to study at the School of the Art Institute, dropping out within the year and falling in with a scene of small rooms and unpolished noise: venues like Situations and Rubicon, fifty people deep, where Pavement's slacker logic mattered more than any conservatory training. Sleepyhead came out self-released in 2016. The Lamb followed on Hardly Art in 2018, then I Want the Door to Open in 2021, an album Pitchfork singled out for pairing her flat, unaffected voice with arrangements that had grown far more deliberate.
Then she stopped touring and left.
First to Taos, New Mexico, a quiet, rural stretch of two years whose social calendar amounted to little more than a weekly karaoke night at the local bar. Then to Seyðisfjörður, on Iceland's remote eastern edge, for a residency through the LungA School's LAND programme. Winter there means permanent dusk, and West spent it sleeping outside, learning about Icelandic herbs and recording whatever the landscape gave her.
That material became if i were a real man i would be able to break the neck of a suffering bird, eight tracks built from field recordings and atmosphere rather than verses and choruses, with Baths turning up as its only outside voice, on "LUNGA". A telescope pulls a smear of light into focus and becomes a star. Colour blooms behind closed eyes. Beats surface occasionally, and quietly, more texture than rhythm. The record's somber tone is really just a description of the light she was living in: a place where the sun barely bothered to rise.
None of this was made for anyone else, which is precisely why it works. West has always been more interesting when the artifice drops, and here there was no audience to perform for, only a landscape, a knife she'd made herself, and whatever she could capture on a recorder between hikes.
She has since returned to Los Angeles, where she was born and partly raised before London and then Chicago pulled her elsewhere. Heaven 2, her Sub Pop debut, arrived there this February, produced by Melina Duterte in a two-week session, with Macie Stewart's strings and Sen Morimoto's saxophone filling in the edges. West has called it one long "what the fuck is happening," a fair description of a record built for other people to hear, in a studio, on purpose. Its Icelandic predecessor was the opposite of all that, and it is the more honest record for it.
