Allie X has referred to her new album Happiness Is Going to Get You as a collection of songs that reside at the crossroads of nostalgia, hope, and dread. Her music isn’t necessarily perky stuff, as catchy as a lot of it is—instead there’s a push and pull in the lyrics to her latest record between emotional pleasure and pain, between the joy of hope and the scars that lie underneath, all of which is echoed in music that spans somber piano balladry to vibrant pop music. Her previous Girl with No Face LP was intense, and while perhaps sonically lighter, Happiness deals with past trauma and relationship issues while striving to move forward. The album title feels like a statement of inevitability, though it also features lyrics like, “There’s a raping in the beauty / You’re alive, there’s no escape / Happiness is gonna get you / Happiness will make you pay.”
A certain darkness runs throughout the entire release, though sometimes there’s also solace in its sadness. “I Hope You Hear This Song”—which gives off “Bitter Sweet Symphony” vibes at its climax—feels like a call-out to someone who you miss, but at the same time, if they don’t feel the same way, you won’t let them forget. “I would say the title of the album is quite dark in its feeling, to me,” Allie shares. “But a lot of people haven’t interpreted it that way, which is interesting.” She notes that the song “Reunite”—a collision of R&B grooviness and harpsichord elegance—sounds “quite saccharine, but it’s actually quite personal. Even [songs] that have a dry humor, it all comes from a place of emotion and a bit of darkness.” One could imagine her performing “Down Season” in a German cabaret. Allie laughs and concurs: “It definitely has this Édith Piaf sort of thing about it. It’s in four, but it’s got a waltzy feeling to it.”
Fans were hoping to hear the new songs live this spring on a five-week, 25-date US tour, but her recent struggles with an autoimmune issue led her to scuttling the cross-country trek for the time being. We’ll have to be content checking out some recent European performances on YouTube, such as her 2025 appearance at the Rough Trade store in Berlin where she was accompanied by a harpsichordist. She’s thought about bringing in other instrumentation in a live setting, though that may not be feasible from a financial perspective. “If I got a performance on a television spot or a big festival somewhere, I would try something like that,” she muses. The Rough Trade gig “was really inspired by the unplugged concert that Björk did around Debut, which was just all these very eclectic world musicians. She did arrangements of her electronic songs using only acoustic sounds. That was very inspiring around this record. But I also love electronics. I would love to have a massive modular synth on a spinning platform on stage, but we don’t have the budget for that.”
As we chat, Allie turns her webcam around to show me her various new analog gear acquisitions, including a LinnDrum machine and an ARP Omni 2 synth—“a rare string machine that Joy Division has all over ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’” Her synthpop-influenced songs certainly owe a debt to the sounds of the ’80s, an era that seems to be in a perpetual state of revival. Allie muses that it was a “super melodic time. I feel like the ’60s and ’70s, the electronics of the ’80s and the drama of it—all the modulation and all the melody that happened—it’s going to give everyone this heightened feeling musically, probably for the rest of time. I don’t think going fully retro is really on trend, but a reference to the ’80s will probably always be.” The red-drenched video for the percolating “Off with Her Tits” from Allie X’s last album looked like it was shot on 3/4-inch videotape. Very ’80s.
“There was this release of emotion that was quite aggressive and dark on Girl with No Face. It created this blank space for something completely different, which was the record I just put out.”
A couple of her latest clips are different, as they feature her encased in a glass cube and sporting spiked hair. For “Is Anybody Out There?” she’s wielding a composer’s baton, while for the new album’s title track she plays piano while blindfolded. This setting could be a metaphor for how she’s spoken about the dichotomy between her digital world of promoting herself and the real-life joy of performing before live audiences. The album’s cover features a nuclear power plant in the background, with her alter-ego, “the Infant Marie,” playing a harp on the beach inside that same glass case. She mentions liking the idea of being in two places at the same time “in the quantum physics sense,” clarifying that “there’s different versions of you that exist at the same time.” The closest a musician comes to that here on Earth is the constantly shifting landscapes that occur during touring. It can be surreal for musicians to wake up in a new city every other day. “I don’t think the human body was designed to fly or to cross time zones, and certainly not to be in a different city every day. It’s always grueling in that sense, but you do get used to it. Humans are really good at adapting.”
Allie has adapted to shifting circumstances in recent years. During the pandemic she struggled with an illness that slowed down the process of making Girl with No Face. It was her first time producing herself, which was more time intensive. A lot of seedlings emerged from those sessions that would manifest a year and a half later into Happiness. “You wouldn’t have been able to understand these things as songs at the time,” Allie recalls. “They were the seeds of what became this album. There was this release of emotion that was quite aggressive and dark on Girl with No Face. It created this blank space for something completely different, which was the record I just put out. That’s never happened to me quite like that before. It was an interesting experience to watch that flow through me.” Although emoting has never been a problem for Allie, the nuts-and-bolts aspects of music production can occasionally be tricky. “It’s never, ‘Oh, I’m too scared to be vulnerable’—I’m not,” Allie says. “It’s more like, ‘I can’t crack the production on this, I can’t find the right drum pattern.’ That wasn’t really an issue on this record compared to the previous record, which I programmed all on analog equipment. There was a huge learning curve. I have 20 versions of ‘Black Eye.’”'
Some of her songs do take time to gestate. Allie reveals that on each of the albums she’s done, there’s always a song that’s at least five years old that just took time to find its place. On the new album it’s “Is Anybody Out There?” with its radiant vocal chorus, and on the previous one it was the title track. Her boyfriend wrote the riff for the latter track 10 years ago, right when the couple met. “My songwriter friends know me as someone who will be stubborn about an idea and pursue it for years until it finds its home,” she shares. One wonders if going over and over an idea for long periods of time might induce eyerolls from her boyfriend. “He should be grateful, because it’s such a good riff. But it didn’t fit on his project, and my project was just a bit too pop until that point. Then, on Girl with No Face, there was room for a post-punk riff.”
The diversity of Allie’s music befits the stage name she chose. The “X” stands for an unknown quotient that seems to shift from album to album. “I still really relate to that name,” she says of the moniker a decade later. “I’m glad that I chose it, and I’m glad that I explored ‘X’ as a concept. I think life is this sense that you’re always evolving, but never fully arriving somewhere. You pick up a lot of things along the way, and you experience a lot of beauty and a lot of pain. You’re constantly becoming someone, but even when you die you haven’t ever fully arrived. I’ve changed quite a lot in the last decade, but I think the ‘X’ is still fitting as part of my name because I still feel that life is pretty much a mystery. I’ll just continue to evolve.”
“I’ve changed quite a lot in the last decade, but I think the ‘X’ is still fitting as part of my name because I still feel that life is pretty much a mystery. I’ll just continue to evolve.”
Speaking of evolution, Allie admits that with modern software it can be easy to try multiple permutations of the same idea. But that can eat up time. Eventually, an artist has to accept that they can only do so much with what they have, and then it’s time to move on. “We talk about writers and producers as good finishers and bad finishers,” Allie explains. “I know a lot of people who aren’t able to get past music being a hobby and for it to become a living because they can’t let go, it’s never good enough. Part of it is this acceptance that it’s just going to have to be a little screenshot of where your life is at in that moment, and it’s never going to be perfect. You’re going to look back on it and hear the flaws in it, but also the beauty in the future. If you can be OK with that, then you can make albums for a living, like me.”
Letting go isn’t always easy. When asked if there’s anything in her life that she let go of that felt good, Allie replies, “I’m an angry person, and anger is in all my music. I wish I was better at letting go of that. I definitely had a moment on the last record where I felt like I let go of my anger, but it’s back. I had a lot of shame and contempt for myself that I’ve been able to truly let go of, which I think is great, and in my early twenties I didn’t think I’d get as far as I’ve gotten in terms of self-acceptance and embracing who I am. I feel that’s great.” FL
