Review: Lucy Liyou grapples with love’s absence in Every Video, Every Sound

thefader.com:

By the time Lucy Liyou was ready to make her new album, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, she’d spent more than half a decade reckoning with the rejection that inspired it.

Seven years ago, Liyou was writing songs from the perspective a closeted college student, terrified to tell her parents she was trans.

When she finally came out to them, their love for her exposed itself as conditional. She’s grown significantly as an artist, expanding her repertoire to include inventive field recordings, tactile synths that can be sunken into neck deep, and a capacity for time expansion that most ambient veterans never achieve.

She’s also shown a surprising knack for pop music, especially the tearjerking kind. Recently, Liyou decided to rework and flesh out some of the fledgling songs she wrote at 19, this time in the wake of a different psychic tragedy: the dissolution of a two-year relationship. “It’s not a breakup album,” she clarifies in the album’s bio. “It’s just me doing my best to document what I’m feeling at this time.” These songs contain complex messages suspended in baths of subtext, but their medium is, for the most part, the pop ballad.