To listen to a Current Joys song is to be immersed fully in Nick Rattigan’s world. An avid consumer of cinema, a visual artist as much as he is a musician, Rattigan’s music is tactile, its imagery and sonics conceived simultaneously. It’s unclear where the films Rattigan is inspired by stop and his personal life starts, but the blending is what makes Voyager so remarkable. Voyager, the seventh LP from Current Joys, rattles with the live-wire feeling that’s thrummed through all of Rattigan’s previous releases: a quavering, scream-itself-hoarse vocals and self-in-terrogation via song. But here, that bristling, sentimental rock‘n’roll cacophony is overlaid with a soundtrack orchestra guiding it along. It’s an odyssey, a grand-sounding journey of self-discovery spread across sixteen tracks. Part ekphrasis, part personal, it’s Rattigan learning new ways to understand his own feelings and identity while inspired by the highly-stylized, striking storytelling of filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Lars Von Trier, Terrence Malick, Agnès Varda, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Voyager is unlike anything Current Joys has released before. On his new LP, Rattigan eschews lo-fi home recordings for a full band and recording sessions at Stinson Beach Studios. As a vocalist/drummer in his other band Surf Curse, Rattigan had finally opened up to the possibility of working in a professional studio: “I’d just been very stubborn in wanting to do it all my own way, but I guess I’ve kind of opened up the creative process to more people at this point,” Rattigan explains. “ And I think it yields better results.” Since 2013 Current Joys’ output has been prolific. A Nevada native, Rattigan began Current Joys in Reno, before moving to New York after school and busting his ass working as a production assistant in the film/TV industry. He’d play Current Joys shows to dismal audiences around New York, and found himself increasingly drawn to Los Angeles’ scene instead. He relocated to LA in 2016, and the songs that make up Voyager began coming together shortly after. Each piece of Current Joys’ previous discography is wholly built and envisioned by Rattigan, self-recorded and quickly released, quivering with a lonely intensity. Within six months of beginning the project, Current Joys had already released its debut, Wild Heart; by 2018, the sixth Current Joys full length and visual album, A Different Age, was out. All the while, Current Joys’ profile quickly and quietly ascended, selling out venues like LA’s El Rey along with European tours, simultaneously amassing millions of streams of the catalog, and a dedicated following. But while the audiences and songwriting/recording approaches changed and continue to evolve for Current Joys, the inspiration Rattigan draws from cinema remains a guiding force. “Something that naturally sort of happened was watching movies and being inspired by them so writing a song about the content of that movie,” Rattigan explains. “But it started to influence me more spiritually when I went to this double feature of Tarkovsky. They were showing The Mirror and Nostalgia at the New Beverly, and just watching those movies made me realize how there’s different ways to communicate music, or communicate art. Obviously with Tarkovsky it’s in a very surreal but spiritual and intense form, and I tried sort of mimicking that feeling into music instead of visuals. I started reading directors’ autobiographies—I’ve always taken way more from what directors do vs. what other musicians do.” Frequently he uses film as a jumping off point for songwriting. “Big Star” was written on tour after watching Adventureland, hoping to capture that specific endless youth energy of the soundtrack’s Replacements and Big Star songs. “Amateur” is piano-heavy, a slow-build of tension, flitting with prettiness, while the creeping “Rebecca,” named after the Hitchcock film before Rattigan had actually seen it, radiates a haunted, sinister presence; “Naked” feels almost unhinged, while “American Honey” is a longing, mellowed lament. The title track, “Voyager pt. 2,” holds a sparse, near-funereal starkness, as well as the album’s thesis: I’m a voyager in my mind, before the Spielberg-esque strings swell. Somehow, the amalgamation of tone fits. Rattigan, who stays up all night to perfect the sequencing of his records once they’re recorded, doesn’t set out with a typical aesthetic in mind – instead, it just happens. Performing is his catharsis. Which feels palpable on Voyager; there’s fragments of hours spent watching movies, as well as stories from his own life; there’s overly-caffeinated car rides blasting the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa; there’s inspiration taken from the crooning presence of frontmen like Jeff Buckley, Chris Isaak, and Nick Cave, as evidenced on Rattigan’s cover of the Boys Next Door’s “Shivers.” And there’s the simple, ecstatic energy of getting a bunch of friends in the studio. It’s all held together by the fervor of Rattigan’s creative process. He believes in the premonitory power of music, and he latches onto the song ideas that strike him in the moment, propelled by an abstract existentialism or burst of feeling more than anything else. It imbues Voyager with an intensity and intimacy – with the sense that you’re getting to hear, all at once, the disparate parts that make a project – or person – into a sprawling, cinematic whole.

Artists Tours About Contact Lala Lala “I want total freedom, total possibility, total acceptance. I want to fall in love with the rock. ”That’s how Lillie West describes the theme of “DIVER,” the song she calls the thesis of Lala Lala’s third record, I Want The Door To Open. The rock in question is a reference to Sisyphus, the mythical figure doomed by the gods to forever push a boulder up from the depths of hell. To West, it is the perfect metaphor for “the labor of living, of figuring out who you are, what’s wrong with you, what’s right with you,” she says. “I think it’s easy to feel like we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, that we never learn, that we’re Sisyphus; but time is actually a spiral that we move up. The key is falling in love with the labor of walking up the mountain.” Coming off of 2018’s acclaimed The Lamb, an introspective indie rock album recorded live with a three-piece band, West knew she was ready to make something sonically bigger and thematically more outward-looking than anything she’d done before; a record that would be less a straightforward documentation of her own personal struggles and more likea poem or a puzzle box, with sonic and lyrical clues that would allow the listener to, as the title says, open the door to the greater meaning of those struggles. The result is I Want The Door To Open, a bold exploration of persona and presence from an artist questioning how to be herself fully in a world where the self is in constant negotiation. From the moment West declares “I want to look right into the camera” over a cascade of dreamy vocal loops on opening track “Lava,” I Want The Door To Open distinguishes itself from anything she’s done before in scope and intensity. The ultra-magnified iteration of Lala Lala is fully encapsulated in the monumental “DIVER.” Inspired by a character from a Jennifer Egan novel, it’s a pop song of Kate Bush-esque proportions replete with layered synths and booming, wide open drumming contributed by fellow Chicago musician Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, and West pushing her vocals to the ragged edge. West co-produced I Want The Door To Openwith Yoni Wolf of Why? and reached out to various music friends to help her achieve a galactic level of atmospherics that would’ve been impossible on her own. In addition to Ogbonnaya, I Want The Door To Open features contributions from poet Kara Jackson, OHMME, Adam Schatz of Landlady, Sen Morimoto, Christian Lee Hutson, and Kaina Castillo. Former tourmate Ben Gibbard can be heard on the gentle “Plates,” a song about accepting the past regardless of whatever negative feelings accompany those memories; a necessary act for unlocking the door to the present moment West is actively seeking on the record. Throughout I Want The Door To Open, West is fascinated with the idea of avatars: how we present ourselves to the world versus how other people see us versus who we really are when we’re alone, and how those images can change over time. “How can anyone else know who you are? How can you know who anyone else is when all these different avatars or personalities or performances are happening simultaneously, in different places,” asks West. It’s a question she poses on the cinematic “Color of the Pool,” a song about wanting to embody the characteristics of something pure and uncatchable that features stacks of wigged-out saxophone from Schatz. West revisits the topic on “Photo Photo,” on which OHMME provide a haunting medieval vocal round as West attempts to parse the various aspects of presentation and representation. “Utopia Planet,” the final track on I Want The Door To Open, features a very special guest: West’s own Grandma Beth, who charmingly relays her thoughts on a painting West made of herself—another avatar of the artist as seen through the eyes of someone who loves her. It is the fitting end to the inner labyrinth that West maps on I Want The Door To Open, a musical quest undertaken with the knowledge that the titular door may never open; but it is through falling in love with the quest itself that one may find the closest thing to total freedom, total possibility, and total acceptance available to us on this plane of existence.