Lala Lala : Heaven 2
As Lala Lala, Lillie West pours years of volatile relationships and life experiences into her lucid indie pop. It’s her vehicle to translate that complex tension into catchy, charming, and insightful songs with a curiously deceptive simplicity. On Heaven 2, West’s propensity for hazy guitar-driven quirky alt-pop is as viscous as ever, but that consistency is the album’s greatest asset. This time, West doesn’t write her musings to endure a grand, personal transformation; she settles into the steadiness that being in the present offers. During the album’s germination, she moved between Chicago, New Mexico, London, and Iceland for endeavors largely unrelated to music. Once she finally settled in Los Angeles and fell in love there, ultimately abandoning restlessness, she crafted the Lala Lala album that sounds most like herself.
The stylistic diversity covers all bases of West’s previous music. The cascading MIDI arrangements in opener “Car Anymore” reiterate her roots as a bedroom pop artist with complete control over her comforting utopia. The swaying, sentimental “Even Mountains Erode” reinvigorates the pop-rock on her previous album, I Want the Door to Open, with a fresh polish. The more sonically out-there tracks, like the downcast “Tricks” and pulsing, wonky “Scammer,” recall West’s naturalistic, flowing instrumental record she released under her own name a couple of years ago during her residency at Iceland’s LungA School. She manifests her music’s carefree quality in the trailing, lo-fi synth-pop melodies in “Anywave.”
Indeed, West retreads each facet of her vibrant career, but pulls them into the present with her words that challenge the notion of being so. On “Even Mountains Erode,” West sings, “There are symbols and signs, you’re missing your life,” acknowledging her experience of learning to slow down. She opens the title track, proclaiming “Heaven is a moment / Hell is a life”—it’s not long until she laments the comedown from past euphoria, singing “Hell is the day after the party” on the paradoxically exultant “Does This Go Faster?” “This City” cruises yet bears many doubtful interrogatives, with West’s desperation for reinventive motion parsable when she mentions the title: “I can leave this city / But I don’t get very far.”
By embracing the now and no longer resisting it, Heaven 2 is a triumph. West’s glimmering pop music is especially substantive here, a product of the many fundamental changes she’s encountered during her life, but she’s sincerely broken from the pain they sparked. Since letting the present wash over her, West has found something better, and perhaps that’s something we should all aspire to do too.
Label: Sub Pop
Year: 2026
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Lala Lala : Heaven 2
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