There’s a scene in Netflix’s “Too Much” in which the heroine, an American transplant in London, listens to a playlist curated by her new British paramour. (Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe star as avatars of the show’s creators, the writer-director Lena Dunham and her husband, the musician Luis Felber.) A lover reveals himself by sharing what he loves. When Cate Le Bon’s 2013 ballad “Are You with Me Now?” began to play, I was as gratified as if I’d written the song myself. The track, breathy and earnest, is a particular favorite of mine, a tune that’s at once yearning and reassuring, perfect for a show about the comfort of old-fashioned romance.
Le Bon, a stage name for the forty-two-year-old Welsh musician Cate Timothy, has released a half-dozen solo albums in the past sixteen years, in addition to two with her onetime partner Tim Presley, under the moniker DRINKS. Her music has been a constant in my life since I first stumbled upon it, a few years ago. “Are You with Me Now?” is representative of Le Bon’s early work: the strummed guitar, the strained soprano, the candid sentiment that’s maybe about love or possibly about death.
I’m fond of the artist’s folksy juvenilia, but it was her 2019 record, “Reward,” that truly won me over. That work marked a decisive shift in musicianship and tone—Le Bon began deploying a deeper, almost spoken register as a singer, while allowing her instrumentation to rely more heavily on eerie, synthesized sounds. Her next album, “Pompeii,” from 2022, saw this experiment continue: the vocals are kind of languid, less likely to strain high than to slide down the scale, only to have the singer hold a note for a few uneasy seconds.
This summer, I found myself obsessively listening to her seventh solo album, “Michelangelo Dying.” It kept me company on vacation, as I strolled by the ocean in the mornings, and at home, as I washed up dishes after dinner. On a long trip to visit my son’s sleepaway camp, I let the record play on repeat because I’m afraid to fiddle with my phone while driving. “Michelangelo,” with its unsettling and mournful atmosphere, captured something about this strange year. I relished its mood of anxiety and melancholy as though I were once again a teen mainlining the Smiths on my Sony Discman. Let’s put it this way: if anyone ever wants to make a television show that distills the tumultuous political, social, and environmental crises of 2025, this record would be an apt soundtrack.
As recently as a couple of years ago, Le Bon called Joshua Tree her home. She crafted this new work in Los Angeles, Cardiff, London, and Hydra. Maybe that peripatetic process accounts for the feeling that the record is talking about the whole world as much as it is about the artist’s life. “Michelangelo” offers a striking contrast to its predecessors: in less than two decades, we’ve witnessed an open-mike songstress morph into Laurie Anderson.
Indeed, the album that “Michelangelo Dying” reminds me of most is Anderson’s seminal “Big Science,” from 1982. There’s an analogous cool-verging-on-blasé lyrical delivery set off by animalesque saxophones. Both albums feature gnomic lyrical pronouncements. (“Rigid, collapse,” Le Bon chants on the track “About Time,” reminiscent of Anderson talk-singing, “Big Science, Hallelujah.”) And both artists leaven their sober tone with bursts of occasional sweetness, even absurdity, as when on “Heaven Is No Feeling” Le Bon intones as though the song has been interrupted by a phone call: “Hello? / What does she want?”
I’m not the only person to associate Anderson’s “Big Science” with 9/11, from its opening track, which details an air disaster (“We are going down / We are all going down, together”) to its incantatory eighth track, “O Superman (For Massenet),” with its chilling observation: “Here come the planes / They’re American planes, made in America.” Listening to “Big Science” now, I am struck by the way that it is a record of its time and yet also seems to forecast, with unnerving specificity, an era decades away. That’s what a handful of artists do—capture the moment, while predicting what lies ahead.
Le Bon strikes me as similarly prophetic. That quality is in her sound more than it is in her language, though I still have the impulse to parse her oblique lyrics. On “Michelangelo” ’s first track, “Jerome,” it’s hard to say if Le Bon is singing about the saint, though it’s plain from how the singer stretches the single syllables of “cry” and “fall” for almost five seconds each that this is a lament.
At first, the album seems to be an elegy for lost love, treated with frankness: “Pieces of my heart erased / And nothing’s gonna change.” Love’s disappointment is an evergreen subject, but here it’s elevated by the idiosyncrasy of Le Bon’s sound. “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” has a distorted, anxious, lo-fi-ish synthesizer, and an air of self-flagellation: “I make jealous talk / I break my heart / Make a joke of love / And of living.” Great songwriting often relies on grammar so private that it only makes sense to the performer. I don’t know what Le Bon means by “No collateral joy / No favorite son / Just the love you gave / On the sideboard,” but I know what to make of that past tense.
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