Allie X’s fourth record, Happiness Is Going to Get You, is a patina-tinged whirlwind of infernal and liminal nostalgia. Its sound—alive and rapturous—elaborates upon Hughes’ signature dark whimsy. Co-produced by Bastian Langebaek, Happiness Is Going to Get You dances through baroque flair—harpsichord, timpani, zither and strings colour the arrangements—while drenched in a chaotic multiple decade sprawl of influences such as Tori Amos, Paul McCartney, Bach, and Air, to name a few. Slowly spiralling through time, Happiness Is Going To Get You is a ferrotype portrait of a woman in free-fall, revisiting tableaus of her life with wide, wet eyes. Its storytelling—carrying a stark sense of eerie calm—balances an inevitable truth: that, as certainly as pain, happiness is coming.

This sense of newfound serenity doubly birthed the record’s heroic alter-ego: The Infant Marie—a bygone time-traveller encased in a Perspex cube, drifting through modernity in the album artwork, delivering the record’s titular message. Marie contrasts the cold, digital world of the twenty-first century and a more tactile, ornamental one recalled from childhood; between programmed beats and wooden keys; between a curated persona and the raw, unfiltered self trying to survive. Backed by this fully-formed narrative, Happiness Is Going to Get You plays like a tragicomedy—poetic, exposed and oddly at peace with its own cosmic punchline. It’s best captured on the rapturous ‘It’s Just Light’ , wherein Hughes captures the disquieting clarity that comes with surrender: “The light / It shines through the glass / And it burns me with its rays.” Hughes doesn’t fight it anymore. She lets it in.