What is Lael Neale’s next step? It is difficult to predict the future, but after all these years, it is clear that the American artist is unpredictable. We can talk about the past and the present. Those familiar with her music will understand the question: the path between I’ll Be Your Man (2015) and Altogether Stranger (2025) is anything but obvious. In the beginning, the music was postcard-like, a round modern folk effect with the desires of someone looking for a place in Los Angeles—and not knowing where it is or what it could be. Then Neale discovered the grain in the image. Acquainted With Night, in 2021, was a disconcerting break with the past. Confirmed two years later with Star Eaters Delight, a beautiful album of pandemic ideas, stopping, accepting the consequences. And above all, realizing that being neutral is not an inevitability, but a choice.
Star Eaters Delight confirmed that she was not going to stand still in the folk stigma of accepting the beautiful. It was recorded on the family farm in Virginia and was also an opposition to life in Los Angeles. Altogether Stranger confronts the 2023 album: the reunion, the shock, with Los Angeles. The story goes that it was recorded in one morning. Nine songs, thirty-two minutes. Lael Neale continues on her path through that grain, in which she is too young to return to the idea of hypnagogic pop, and too old—with all due respect—to see it as an influence. What remains, then, is the right idea.
Galaxie 500 and everything that came from it—especially Damon & Naomi—overlap in the present. Lael Neale is not trying to make music as timeless as Galaxie 500’s, she is trying to understand its rhythm, to exist in that clot of sensitivity between the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3, or between the psychedelia of another life in Los Angeles and the more experimental rock approaches of Britpop (strangely, Blur comes to mind here and there). That, then, is the right idea. In that sense, it feels present, where the winds of the present rise to nostalgia, where the shock of the Los Angeles pavement is conveyed with the abrasive, uncomfortable, and true tone it deserves. She purges this general malaise so that others don’t have to. Something so common, so banal, becomes so personal in the words and voice of Lael Neale. At times, it’s even a lullaby. Let us be lulled by her and by them.
AS
