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‘The breakup was like an amputation that saves you’: Cate Le Bon on healing from heartache and her heavy new album
After a long relationship ended painfully, the acclaimed singer-producer swapped the Californian desert for south Wales – and set to work on her most emotionally direct record yet. ‘It’s been discombobulating,’ she says
In an unparalleled catalogue of uncanny, soft-worn post-punk that’s entirely Le Bon’s own – one that started in 2008 and hit its stride with 2016’s absurdist Crab Day – the album is another cut above: emotionally direct in a new way for her, but submerged in a crystalline murk, like light refracted through shadowy water (the artwork depicts her drowning). She starts her day by making coffee and listening to drone music: “almost like medication” – Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Éliane Radigue, the latter recommended by Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, whose last record Le Bon produced. The album’s imagery was inspired by another room, Tunisian-American artist Colette Lumiere’s installation Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream, depicting a woman alone in a chamber lavishly draped with fabric, with mirrors.
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