Mentally crawling on the floor with Lala Lala at L’Escogriffe

“How do you say ‘I’m pregnant’ in French?” Lillie West of Lala Lala asked us, “It’s probably like ‘I have’ or something,” the indie singer had just impressed us with her mediocre yet competent French. The audience chimed in with various pregnancy phrases, “yeah, I have that,” Lillie confirmed. Despite being four months pregnant while on tour, Lala Lala delivered a captivating and emotionally laden performance at L’Escogriffe on a chilly Sunday night. The pregnancy announcement clarified the self-imposed restraint of the ethereal indie singer; she stared the audience down with a stone blue chiselled face. She told us she couldn’t breathe properly, “normally I’m crawling around on stage, but I would suffocate,” to the fault of the little grubber sucking away her life force (her words, not mine). 

    The ethereal indie band is finishing up their East Coast leg of their tour for the new album Heaven 2. Opening for them was Minneapolis’ Mother Soki, an indie dream pop version of Ethel Cain with more texture and ethereal vocals. I felt like I was in a 2026 version of Twin Peaks, especially with the singer's pointed black stiletto boots (which she later took off for comfort). Flanked by two guitarists and a table full of midi controllers, synths, drum pads, and a laptop, Mother Soki filled the venue with ethereal indie pop for the growing crowd, some of whom she recognized from their concert last Halloween. 

    I’ve been a fan of Lala Lala since their debut album Sleepyhead, released in 2016. Their signature mermaid indie soundscapes have always thoroughly brought me into their world. Heaven 2 expands on that, opening the sonic landscape up to the windswept mountain tops of the Californian coast. This album was written as Lillie West searched for and ran from home, leaving Chicago and finding selves in London, Iceland, and the American southwest, eventually finding love in Los Angeles and learning to settle down. Heaven 2 is about shifting into stillness, amidst a rapidly changing world and vibrating layers of synth. The four-piece band created expanses of space packed with sound on stage, and each instrument had an array of synth pedals and waves of reverb. Lillie West expertly maneuvered the numerous vocal modulations she uses while their drummer impressively navigated between a drum pad and a traditional set with additional chimes made of keys and various strings of bells. I was extremely pleased that saxophonist Sen Morimoto was part of the touring band. The shattering screams of a saxophone became the meaty difference between recorded tracks and the live experience, frequently bringing us to the peak and into the echoing ends of many songs. Underneath the full band were backing tracks of synthy beats and echoing vocals. This always catches me off guard. When I’m in the audience, I like to hunt for the origin of the sounds I hear, which guitar is bringing us this riff and how the bassist is moving their fingers across the frets. When there are backing tracks, it almost feels like there's a ghost on stage, an invisible USB underlying the live instrumentation. Granted, with the complex and intricately layered songs of Lala Lala, it would be difficult to take up all the sonic space that they do without pre-made tracks, so I laid down my hunting ears and let myself get awash with the emotion of live music.