(Credits: Art School Girlfriend)
Art School Girlfriend – ‘L.Y.A.T.T’
Adoring, wistful, cinematic, intriguing – so many words and none of them feel quite adequate. A good love song will leave you feeling like that, making my job pretty hard, and right now, Art School Girlfriend has left me stumped.
A year on from the release of her last album Hard Landing, Art School Girlfriend has returned like ‘L.Y.A.T.T’. “Love you all the time,” she repeats as if it’s as simple as breathing and on her mind just as much. Beginning first as a slow, tripping track, it quickly picks up. Soon, that message of love comes like a supercharged heartbeat instead, thumping along with the track.
It’s two in one, and the competition for which side of her work wins out is steep. The song’s shoegazed beginnings are so gorgeous that you’d be more than happy if it simply stayed as soft as that. But when the techno elements come into play, the fact that you could also happy hear the song blasting from basement soundsystems is also a treat.
And is that just like love itself? The gentleness and the ecstasy? It’s easy to make a classic ballad, but here there’s something more interesting and arguably far more reflective of the actual feeling at play.
For Art School Girlfriend herself, or Polly Mackey, the track especially captures love in the face of struggle. That thudding heartbeat is an anxious one being soothed by the message of commitment as she said, “’L.Y.A.T.T.’ is about the resilience of love through times of physical or mental distance and hardship.”
To her, it’s a calming reminder, or “An unfaltering and unwavering declaration for the times when life may be taking its toll.”
Written, composed, recorded and produced all by Mackey in her home studio, that too lends itself for a love song with real intimacy to it. Despite the scales the sonics eventually reach by the end, it holds onto a clear feeling of tenderness and vulnerability likely fostered by the simple fact that she made it in the privacy of herself, where that outside world of hardship couldn’t penetrate the lushness of the feeling.
In short? It’s a gorgeous love song. It’s also a truly gorgeous comeback for an artist who has been one to pay attention to for quite some time now. Hopefully, sitting as the start of a new, bigger project, now is the time to start listening if you haven’t already.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
