A6 by Lights: This isn't a review, this is the damage talking

Time compresses and stretches in unpredictable ways. As you dig back through emails and texts, events that felt far apart prove to have overlapped, and moments you remember going hand in hand took place with months or years between them. As I listened to Lights' new album, A6, I tried to remember when it was I'd discovered Siberia – her second album, the first I'd heard – and pictured myself at the co-working space we had in Pittsburgh for the small cluster of Yinzer Stitch Fix engineers. I also knew that couldn't be right, because I'd discovered Lights as I started grappling with the mental health issues I'd avoided looking in the eye for most of my life, and Stitch Fix wasn't even hiring engineers at that point.

It's especially difficult when it comes to Lights, an artist whose work I've been enraptured with for almost 15 years now, and whose work has been woven through so many critical moments of my life. "Heavy Rope" and "Cactus in the Valley" helped me to accept the feeling of helplessness that came with acknowledging the depression that was dragging me down. "Same Sea" (Little Machines version) and (years later) "Almost Had Me" were with me while my confidence in Mimesis failed and led me back to places where I could make it better, and finally release it. "Same Sea" (Midnight Machines version) was our first dance song at our wedding less than a year ago. While some of those are anchors in time, others smash together into one, messy, emotional knot. Something as recent and powerful as dancing with my wife to "Same Sea" is easy to place in time, but when you've struggled with a novel for years, the points where you fought your way back to the light feel closer together than they actually were.

With the release of A6, I'm back in it with an artist whose work is closer to my life than maybe any other, caught in a web of events that feel both immediate and distant at the same time.

The odd thing about Lights being this important to me is that I know, whenever I talk about her, no one is going to have a clue who she is. That probably includes you, the reader, right now, and if you do know, there's a good chance it's only because of me. For an artist who's had a successful career, multiple national tours (including one with Owl City), and has won numerous awards, it's incredibly hard to find a fellow fan. That may be more understandable when I note that the awards she's won are Juno awards, which means she's a Canadian artist, and that the island I'm on could just be "America".

Still, though I am unmoored in both time and culture, A6 is here and it's fantastic. The first single released from the album, "Damage", leans on one of Lights' most common themes, the almost casually present experience of your brain dragging you away from how you wish you felt. The music video is a single take as Lights sings into a mirror, for-real cutting her hair as she does.

I'm headed down a rabbit hole
Does anybody want anything?
I'm gonna be a while, be away all week
I'm not gonna answer texts, fuck it, I'll delete

All of my contacts, but I won't really, though
Because I need attention, I'm an attention hoe
I better post a picture so you know I'm alive
So you can think about me

Songs about how totally broken our brains can be aren't novel. It's the way Lights writes about it as something that's neither aberration nor status quo, but both at once, that's always spoken to my own challenges in understanding myself. Depression is both part of me and something affecting me. It sometimes pulls me down, but it's still woven through who I am even when it's not. Through all these songs runs a through-line of the need to know that being loved, that being seen as the whole person you are, remains possible.

Like in Siberia's "Cactus in the Valley":

And wipe the mark of madness from my face
Show me that your love will never change
If my yesterday is a disgrace
Tell me that you still recall my name

Or in the same album's "Heavy Rope":

I'm a little bit on the edge
Holed up and out of reach
I can't hear much of what you said
To comfort me

Don't let me tumble away
Into the throws of the shadowy bay
I cling to the rock, and it's crumbling off
Toss me a heavy rope, it's a slippery slope

Contemplative and with sharper teeth than her more recent work, A6 is acutely aware of something else I've loved about being a Lights fan: the clear, significant evolution of her work from album to album. Her first album, The Listening, feels not only like it's from a different artist than the one who wrote A6, but it feels almost as alien to its immediate successor in Siberia.

While there's a lot to enjoy in The Listening, the production feels filtered through the expectations of what a young woman pop star should be and sound like. It's very much a Female Pop Album of its time, even if the engagement with her darker selves is bubbling under the surface. With Siberia, it's all flipped over, wrapped in edgier production melding dubstep and bitpop. Her next album (and my personal favorite), Little Machines, swung back into a poppier space, but grounded in more mature territory. Written while pregnant and emerging out of a year of writer's block, it's an album that's a major inflection point between her earlier work and what would come. Skin and Earth is a concept album backed by a post-apocalyptic comic written by Lights as well, and Pep goes in another conceptual direction, treating each song as the work of a distinct character.

A6, titled that way because it's her sixth album, looks back at that evolution and engages directly with it. Merging tones and approaches from across her career, A6 is superficially a celebration of the road to this point, but the content of the work itself is directly from the actual human who has emerged from that road. There's a harsher cynicism running through many of the songs lyrically, even as the new wave-leaning vibe of those same songs counterweights it all.

Reflecting that, y'know, reflection, are the music videos for "Surface Tension" (a song leaning more in the "new Lights" direction) and "White Paper Palm Trees" (tilting more towards "original Lights" in style). Shot to contrast and complement each other if played side by side, they serve as both musical and visual acknowledgements of how far the artist has come without looking down on where things began.

The thing about a new Lights album, though, is that you often get to reassess it a year later. Starting with Siberia, Lights has released a companion album to each of her works. Sometimes (like with Siberia and Skin & Earth) these are acoustic cover albums, but others (the mighty Midnight Machines as well as dEd) are full reimaginings of the songs from their source album. Stripped of their electropop stylings, and often shot through a darker lens, I inevitably find myself back at the original album again with new eyes.

What we'll get on the other side of A6, I do not know, but the way Lights' albums evolve beyond their original release has been a key part of my attachment to her work. When Little Machines dropped, my clear favorite track was "Same Sea", a song whose upbeat synth pads and pulsing beat absolutely killed live. A year later, its mirror on Midnight Machines brought somber, romantic strings and soft choruses to the same melody and hit me even harder. Hard enough that, years after its release, it became the clear choice for our wedding dance.

And when the currents take us out again to opposite oceans
Out of the hands of safety
From the shallows to the deepest end
Places we break and bend
You're the one in it with me
No matter how far we get
Oceans we are in still connect
And when the currents circle back again
They'll carry us with them to the arms of the same sea

It's still early days for my time with A6, and I don't know how I'll feel after more time with it. At the moment, it may be my favorite album of hers since Little Machines, but the truth is that I can listen to any of her work and be happy I did. Most importantly, it's another step forward for an artist whose work has been changing as I have, who hasn't stayed still for a moment, not even now, when that moment is looking back on how she got here. It's an album that makes the past feel close and far all at once, like the moments in my own life that those songs and albums have become bound up with. I don't know what more I could ask for.