COVER STORY | Exploring the Vibrancy of L’Rain’s Campy, Fragmented Cosmos

When Ben Chapoteau-Katz told Taja Cheek that her third L’Rain album should be titled I Killed Your Dog, she didn’t realize he was joking. But it’s such a visceral four words to read aloud, and it’s exactly what the record needed—a composite of what it feels like to hurt when a dear relationship ends, or how we cause harm even through good intentions. Cheek wants us to feel every syllable of the album’s title, to be plagued by each letter together. “I felt the waves hitting my face and built a new one in its place,” the Brooklyn composer sings on the title track, atop a minimalistic piano melody where a distorted, dissociated laugh turns maniacal underneath. “I killed your dog, it made me happy.” You are meant to feel squeamish when she murmurs every note. At the dawn of our call together, my own dog nestles up next to me, her collar chain rattling into the microphone. Cheek’s dog is nearby, too, causing a very quiet stir. It feels like an apt scene to be caught up in. “I don’t like saying the title, which means that I’m onto something,” Cheek explains. “I’m really getting at an emotion really quickly, which is what I hoped for.”

I Killed Your Dog is a record that is as challenging as it is beautiful, and it’s a heroic continuation of her breakthrough sophomore LP Fatigue. A user on Reddit in a discussion post about the album even wrote “I want to like it! I just find it a bit…hard to listen to” upon its release a few months ago. But to make your way through all 16 tracks of I Killed Your Dog is to step into a world that is non-linear, and one that dares to shake up your preconceptions about what delicacy might sound like when it gets plugged into more than a dozen colors, shapes and names. Cheek has been prominent in the Brooklyn music scene for more than 10 years, playing in bands like Throw Vision after graduating from Yale in 2011 and adopting the L’Rain moniker in the mid-2010s—when she released her eponymous debut album in 2017 via a local label called Astro Nautico. In the six years since, Cheek has been deliberately chipping away at defining her sound—which, at its core, holds no label or focused distinction. The work of L’Rain is, famously, work that never slows down or stands still.

Cheek is a self-proclaimed stubborn creator, someone who—sometimes—prioritizes making what she wants over doing upkeep on her career. “It would be really nice to make some money from this project, that would be really nice,” she says, bursting into giant laughter. “And I really want to have a career on my own terms. So that means, sometimes, you’re gonna get overlooked for things or you’ll be in the first slot of the festival. And it is what it is, I don’t have any regrets.” For a long time, Cheek never paid much attention to the difference between critical acclaim, commercial success and having a fanbase. But now, that conversation is something she is having with herself more regularly. She’s been thinking about what it means to build a legacy while balancing the aforementioned characteristics of a continued music career.

This past summer, I caught L’Rain’s performance at the Columbus installment of the Re:SET Festival concert series. She shared a bill with Jamie xx and LCD Soundsystem—acts who are largely situated quite firmly in their own lanes. But having an artist like Cheek involved in a weekend-long slate of shows that also included artists like boygenius, Clairo, Steve Lacy and IDLES was a massive move to make—at least from my perspective. To throw songs like “Two Face” and “American Sonnet (35)” into a night filled with more pop-centric and indie-rock-leaning soundscapes put Cheek in an environment she finds ideal—because it places her music in front of audiences who aren’t familiar with her game and might not immediately jive with someone opening their set by barking like a dog. When L’Rain is featured in a lineup that isn’t avant-garde in the slightest—like her recent stint opening shows for Brittany Howard—she’s not the most approachable version of herself, yet crowds buy into what she’s doing and get stoked on the work. It’s the type of elaborate, surreal craftsmanship colliding with the zeitgeist, and it imagines a world where experimental music is not as niche as the music industry makes it out to be.

“Having a community is important and being in a community of like-minded people that understand what’s happening is important,” Cheek explains. “And if that’s a community of five people, that’s valid and that should exist. But, also, I think it does a disservice to really radical ideas and experimental ideas to keep them in a box away from other people. I don’t think that does anybody any good. I feel like culture has changed because weird ideas filter into the mainstream, and that can be looked at more holistically, too, in terms of political ideas and ways of thinking about society. I feel like everything changes because of radical people that aren’t afraid to do things their own way—and it, somehow, gets leaked out into a broader public and people start looking at their own lives differently. Being separate from the world is not super interesting to me, but it is really hard to always feel like you’re doing something different or being the weirdo or left-of-center—always being the one who’s the strange one or the odd one can feel really alienating. But, I think it’s important, and I’m just gonna keep doing it.”

Cheek is always making music that has to be released at the exact moment that it actually is, always picking up nuggets of context and curiosity from the world around her, watching how people respond to certain ideas and, then, directly responding to those presentations herself. “I don’t think I could have made I Killed Your Dog a bunch of years ago, and I couldn’t have made it years in the future,” she says. “It had to be at that moment. I’m, at least in a broad sense, looking at culture—and that seems like such a weird thing. It’s not very tangible or helpful, I guess, but I’ve often found that, when I’m looking at something or thinking about something, I’ll start to see it happening around me.” Cheek quickly mentions Drake’s recent studio album For All the Dogs, which came out one week before I Killed Your Dog.

“I’m always finding synergies like that around me,” she adds. “But also, in a broader sense, I’m trying to create a conceptual and political framework for myself that, 10 years from now, I can look at my life and feel like it really matches up with the things I believe in—or I have a more solid understanding of how I want to be in the world, and I’m getting closer and closer to that.” The work Cheek is doing for the L’Rain project right now is directly inspired by political ideologies and societal critiques. She holds a lot of respect for activists—though she notes that she does not consider herself one—and looks to them often in her writing. Fatigue especially was an album that Cheek used as a vessel for her own evolving understanding of abolitionist frameworks. “Why do we still fear the sky when planes still soar like Gods? Feel mad just feel sane, somebody told me ‘make a way out of no way’” from “Find It” remains a particularly moving example of phrasing.

Like taking cues from abolitionist texts, Cheek’s navigation throughout the world of experimentalism is one that is a historical pursuit that, like jazz, is done in the name of the people who came prior to her. It’s a means of building an original voice in the same way that past generations have. The mission of L’Rain is, from Cheek’s perspective, a way of slowing down the mechanism of consumption and, maybe, halting it sometimes, too—at least in ways that can be co-opted. The urges that Cheek gets to confuse listeners, to remain circuitous as a means of serving Black art and dislodging any mainstream preconceptions of it. It’s the reason why she makes the music she makes.

“Black artists before me, the struggles that they’ve had with the industry and trying to be seen in all of their nuance and boldness and not being able to—and seeing artists who died without recognition or died without any money, only later to be celebrated once they’re dead—I don’t want any of those things to happen to me. I don’t want it to happen to anyone,” Cheek says. “But, I feel like that’s part of the impulse to make the music that I make, to exist in this liminal space that doesn’t allow for any broad generalizations about what I am. You can’t engage with the work without having a nuanced approach to what the work is. Another part of it, for me, is recognizing that so many genres—especially genres pioneered by Black American musicians—are inherently experimental. But they’re overlooked or talked about in a different way because of what they are.”

Parts of I Killed Your Dog were inspired by the compositional puzzles of Bach’s last work, The Musical Offering—a collection of keyboard canons, fugues and motif cycles that were partially written and then continuously modulated by whomever was playing it. Cheek herself is floored by baroque music, and it’s the type of style she grew up playing when she first started learning piano. She explains that it always sounded like R&B to her, that there was always an inherent connection between the two genres—especially in ornamental terms, church-centric, foundational roots and the emphasis on keyboards and harpsichords. And then, as we all are, Cheek was thinking about Beyoncé (especially “Love on Top”) and how inflection can create a sense of excitement that is widely accessible across the current landscape of pop music. “It always is modulating higher and higher and higher and higher to a state of ecstatic newness,” she says. “But no one ever is modulating the opposite way—because, who would? It’s just horrible and bad. So I was like, ‘What would happen if you did that? What would be the psychological effect of that? So, I wrote this puzzle for myself, to figure out a way that I could always have the motif naturally modulate downward.”

A lot of the earliest L’Rain songs began as fragments in a secret SoundCloud. Cheek is quite sectional with her work, in a way that arrives as her, quite literally, putting pieces together—and it helps her remain always connected to a younger version of herself. “I’m learning now that there was something really special that I think I was tapping into, a kind of fearlessness,” she says. “I’m always connected to that, because I have all of that material on my computer. But, also, I feel like it’s encouraging, because this way of recycling material makes it so that nothing is garbage. I feel like I’m never wasting my time. Instead of writing something and being like, ‘This is garbage,’ I try to have a philosophy where nothing is garbage. There’s no bad ideas, it’s just—maybe—the incorrect application at the wrong time. I can always take a melody from something that I was working on, or a bassline or a harmonic progression—there’s always something that I can take and reuse. But, on the other hand, it can sometimes feel like a crutch, because I have all of this material that I can always just use. I probably have another record’s worth of starts of musical ideas that I can pull from. But it’s also really comforting. It comes from a place of ‘If I never come up with another idea in my life, at least I have something I can use.’”

And the way Cheek samples herself, like she does on “Knead Bee,” remodeling “Need Be” from Fatigue, it’s as if she’s letting her work exist as a living archive—a very real representation of the idea that art is never really complete, that it can be reconfigured, refashioned and repurposed over and over again. She does that on “r(EMOTE)” and “Our Funeral,” too, where the drama of her work allows her to reconnect with her older self in ways that are amusing and emotional. Closing track “New Year’s UnResolution” was written at different periods in Cheek’s life, done so as a means of portraying how intervals can change and we can, often, lose parts of ourselves through the passing of time. “Will you forget me along the way?” is the final line of I Killed Your Dog, an expressive balm of worry that bookends a record built on the act of remembrance.

To do such an act, Cheek pulls inspiration from punk music’s never-ending arsenal of songs having infinite versions of themselves, as well as the songwriting of someone like Jay Reatard—who would create tons and tons of iterations of his work. “I think it’s really cool, to try to be less precious about stuff,” she says. “Because I am very precious about things. It’s nice to think about there being different versions of something, that’s comforting to me. Also, it just contributes to world-building, in a way. Not to sound too woo-woo, but I often have things in my music that I’m sure no one can hear, but they’re in there. And I feel like they’re contributing to an energy where I’ll talk really low and say things and no one knows what I’m saying—but it’s in there, and I feel like, maybe, people can feel it in some way. And, in the same way, I feel like using your own material is a way of just infusing a particular energy into a track.”

For Cheek, it’s her own version of Bach’s compositional puzzles, only hers includes references to birthdays and at least one song reworked from something on a previous album. It makes for a fun untangling for listeners, but it also maintains a glowing continuity between records. Collaging lyrics from various parts of her life on Fatigue helped open the door for her to really streamline a contemporary portrait of herself on I Killed Your Dog, with sharp callbacks to the former without compromising the newness of the latter. “It’s a reflection of my process, which is very iterative and very reflective, especially because I’m mostly working with the same people,” Cheek explains. “I think it’s us reflecting on our own process in a way of saying ‘Okay, we did this on this record, what do we want to do on the next one? How do we surprise ourselves with things we want to keep the same?’”

While I Killed Your Dog still—quite often—taps into the R&B palette L’Rain is most known for, the album explores other genre tropes more fervently, especially rock ‘n’ roll. But Cheek is not out here putting on a display of stereotypical anthemic singing and loud, heavy riffs. While a song like the Strokes-evoking, tongue-in-cheek “Pet Rock” is poking fun at the confines of “Dad Rock”—especially in regards to the fathers who would accompany their daughters to L’Rain shows—Cheek’s interrogations of rock ‘n’ roll on a larger scale come from a cultural perspective and exploration of the barriers that that kind of music so often puts up. “I’m thinking about the roots of rock ‘n’ roll as a Black American genre,” she says. “And there’s just so many teenybopper white woman rock fans right now—which, in one sense, it’s really cool that something that has become so male, in a very particular way, can be broken up by a totally different audience of people. And, on the other side, there’s a lot of people that are getting left out of that. I’ve always felt that, as someone that listened to a lot of rock music growing up and had a lot of other friends of color—specifically Black friends—that were into that, too, that were like, ‘Yeah, this is weird.’”

Likewise, Cheek grew up on a steady cocktail of musicians like The Breeders and Brandy, and her time spent working in college radio at Yale still has such a huge influence on her approach to music-making. You can hear how her wide knowledge of sonic histories is so deftly woven into every inch of her own work—and it’s a direct result of her obsessing over the art form years ago, when she would write down every single artist on any pieces of paper she could get her hands on, so she could look them up later and download every song in sight. “I feel like, once you’re exposed to just such a wide range of music, your mind and your world and your understanding of what’s possible—not in a technical sense of ‘This is how you sample in this way,’ but just emotional possibilities of how music can resonate with you and what kind of role it can play in your life—that changes you,” Cheek explains.

She also cites the Blog-Era DIY scene she came up in as a crucial factor in her broadened taste, and notes how much of a bygone it is at this point. “I couldn’t get into ‘real’ venues, so I was going to DIY spaces and listening to weird stuff there,” she adds. “My world was very big, musically, and I think it gave me a better ear.” In turn, a song like “5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwag)” follows the same interpretation as a Joni Mitchell arrangement, even though Cheek has never been familiar with Mitchell’s work at all. And “I Killed Your Dog” has a structure that references Joan Baez’s “Here’s To You.” The way dainty vocals pass through ventricles of distorted noise on “r(EMOTE)” sounds a lot like the shapeshifting work of a band like Animal Collective, whose music she came up on more than a decade ago. These instances are a mark of her following instincts and ending up in the most quintessential folk music place, where everything is up for interpretation and every tone and texture can be, and should be, mangled into something brand new.

A huge part of L’Rain as a project is Cheek’s usage of interludes. They play a key factor in the momentum of every record, and it’s a direct reflection of her upbringing listening to hip-hop and R&B. These in-between moments, like “Sincerity Commercial,” “I Hate My Best Friends,” “All the Days You Remember” and “Oh Wow, A Bird!,” are collages that offer Cheek moments of reprieve during the extensive labor that recording sessions can be, and making them allows her to trust what she’s capable of instead of falling into traps of doubt. “I think, for me, I never really set out to write a song. I’m just kind of making and, in the process of making, it’ll guide me to what the creation wants to be. And, sometimes, I feel like they want to be more song and, sometimes, I feel like they want to be more gestural. For me, the interlude creations are more therapeutic to make—because all my music is centered around my gut and instinct,” she explains.

“But those are especially so and, because oftentimes, they are relying more heavily on these audio recordings that I’m always taking, there’s not even an opportunity or an opening for me to question my musicianship or have a moment of serious doubt—because it just doesn’t lend itself to what I’m even doing, which is very freeing for me,” Cheek continues. “I’m just collaging and I have a sense of what needs to happen. And I can’t really communicate it in words, I just have to do it. Sometimes, I get surprised by what happens when I can respond to it, but it always feels like a happy moment for me. The rest of the recording process I really love, but it can be really tough on me. I’m very prone to existential crises, and those are triggered very often in the midst of recording—but not when I’m making collages.”

A large recurring theme of L’Rain albums is Cheek’s emphasis on creating a space where Black women can embrace femininity. Portrayals of confidence and attitude in music from Black women are so often picked apart relentlessly by white audiences—especially white male audiences—and there’s a very palpable spiritual undercurrent of empowerment on I Killed Your Dog, so much so that Cheek calls it her “basic bitch” album. But making an album accessible is not a conscious or deliberate in-studio decision. It’s more about Cheek tapping into the overarching ethos of how she wants her music to be contextualized in the world. On Fatigue, she was pulling influence from Amiri Baraka and Coko. On I Killed Your Dog, it was Raymond Scott and Delia Derbyshire. This music is not synthesized into mainstream palatability for the sake of getting more people to listen to it, it’s a mark of malleability being achieved through resonance—and, in the case of I Killed Your Dog, that resonace comes via depictions of relationships, grief and breakups (though Cheek has designated this project as an “anti-breakup album”).

“I wanted to have more entry points that make [I Killed Your Dog] accessible,” she explains. “So I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll just talk about relationships like every pop star does. That’s going to be my impetus.’” Cheek is quick to reiterate that, on L’Rain projects, she’s playing a character whose persona is that of someone who is secure in what they’re doing and doesn’t care about anything. It’s an aspirational version of her that she hopes to explore further on subsequent albums. It’s why she’s so attracted to R&B and gospel, there are so many Black women who are organists and also singers—something you don’t see in other genres nearly as much, where Black women are encouraged to be themselves and are, consequently, revered for it. I Killed Your Dog being built on the shoulders of accessibility does not mean it’s simplistic. No, far from it. “I hate when my music is treated with white gloves or thought of as heady or intellectual,” Cheek adds. “I’m a very emotional person, and all of my music comes from a very emotional place. Just because I have a song in 17 [time signature], it doesn’t mean I’m thinking about it being in 17. I’m not thinking about it that way, my body was just moving in 17 and that’s why it’s in 17.”

On I Killed Your Dog, Cheek can be found taking risks, too. “Clumsy” is a song that sticks out to her the most, and it was the installment that she was most nervous about including in the final cut. “It’s the biggest departure and the ballsiest thing I’ve done so far, just because I don’t think of myself as a singer or a musician in a traditional sense—which some people take issue with, but that’s just how I feel,” she says. “I definitely don’t feel like a singer. It almost wasn’t on the record a couple of times, but I’m glad it’s there. You can hear my voice way more than you can hear it on any other track, which makes me nervous and uncomfortable—which, generally, is a sign for me that I’m doing something that I should be doing, even though it feels a little bad.”

L’Rain’s first two albums tackled grief and self-care, but I Killed Your Dog focuses on intimacy and passion in ways that arrive like the natural next step for Cheek as a songwriter. These depictions of love and romantic loss have always been present in her work, but they were previously de-emphasized in the context of those records as a whole rather than thrust into any kind of narrative spotlight. Now, as Cheek continues to embody the L’Rain persona, she’s getting more and more comfortable mixing the real and the imagined, more comfortable projecting emphasis on stories rather than setting the sonics aglow first and foremost.

“Time kind of collapses in on itself when I’m working on records, because I’m writing things in the moment and also pulling from my archive,” she says. “A lot of music was written during times of breakups, so that was always kind of there. And that’s what, I think, made it feel honest or like it was natural. I don’t think I had to adjust my thinking very much, and that’s what I hope can happen with my records in general—that it’s less like a research assignment. Whatever feels natural to me as a person is probably what I need to be making as an artist, too. The lines between my personal life and my work life are already extremely blurred.”

I Killed Your Dog is full of humor and surreal lightheartedness, and much of it is deliberate. In the skit “What’s That Song?,” you can hear someone trying to figure out a jazz song and they mention how “it sounds like all of them”; in “Uncertainty Principle,” Cheek takes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and applies it to a relationship with a subtle touch of devastation (“512 days passed since those binary years, those dying years”); “I Hate My Best Friends” zeroes in on when synthesists were using the most cutting-edge instruments of their time to make banal advertisement jingles and boasts an arrangement that, funnily enough, contains no synthesizers. Cheek also finds pleasure in titling songs, even going as far as hiding funny messages in them with her collaborators. The album title itself is brutal, yet it’s also absurd and ridiculous at the same time—and that’s a mark of Cheek’s appreciation for dark comedy. But, it’s also a product of what she and her friends are doing, which is joking around with each other when they’re recording. The laughs on I Killed Your Dog, no matter how uncomfortable they might get, come from real interactions between people that care about each other—and from Cheek being snarky.

But I Killed Your Dog is not just some humorous display; it’s a folk album that bears resemblance to the traditional songbook and the infinite colors each entry might take when it falls into different sets of hands. Cheek will likely take one of these 16 songs and rework it for whatever the next chapter is for L’Rain. The music on this record is visceral and familiar and unnerving. “I want to try to fill myself with the things I’ve lost, the things I wanted, the things I love,” Cheek sings on “5 to 8 Hours (WWwaG).” “You love like stolen land, at my worst I do, too.”

There are pensive hymns all across this album, as Cheek constructs a poppier facade for her embroidered heartache. “But I’m on my way to getting free, this is the only moment in the history of the universe that we will be here together,” she concludes. “Celebrate by being here.” With each listen, a new detail emerges—whether it’s a snippet of a Joselia Hughes poem or spliced images of people saying the same phrase over and over to make one new voice. The hard-wired intricacies are a tapestry of noise rock, dream pop, gospel and synth-folk. It’s sublime and campy and unsettled, and that is the gift of a L’Rain record—in that it’s populated with fragments of imperfection that, ultimately, send it barreling further towards the inverse.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.