On “DIVER,” Lillie West’s latest track as Lala Lala, she makes fighting against hell a romantic battle. “All my time I have is diamonds,” she sings. She flips the tragedy of Sisyphus into a desired quest to overcome her demons. She imagines that maybe she can be a diver, in reference to the character Anna Kerrigan from Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, in which Kerrigan works in a Brooklyn Navy Yard and becomes the first female diver sent down to repair ships. “Swimming out towards my new life / Dragged in by the undertow,” West sings as her voice gives out with the waves coming in.
“DIVER” is the first look we get at the forthcoming album from the Chicago-based artist, the follow-up to 2018’s The Lamb, titled I Want the Door to Open. In a quote about the track, West revealed, “I think it’s easy to feel like we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, that we’re Sisyphus. The key is falling in love with the labor of walking up the mountain. I want total freedom, total possibility, total acceptance. I want to fall in love with the rock.”
The track comes with help from fellow musicians NNAMDÏ, Christian Lee Hutson, and Macie Stewart of OHMME (who also announced her first solo album, Mouth Full of Glass, yesterday). It also comes with a suspenseful, stunningly lit video, where West smashes through ice to get to a pair of keys. Is it to open the door? I fucking hope so!
Watch the video for “DIVER” below.
