Loviet has never shied away from the fact that her debut full-length album, 777, is a bit of a motley collection. It is, as she says, the theme park to the rollercoaster of her previously released EP, Everyone Know The Thrills When It’s Over. Flush with pop hooks, the album careens through big vibes like Loviet was born to produce hits, but, for her, 777 remains a very experimental album.
The last couple of years have naturally led to some unorthodox approaches to releasing an album. The time-tested processes of workshopping songs, road-testing them in front of live audiences, and honing them with bandmates in a face-to-face environment, have all gone out the window and been replaced with some form of compromise, coloured with the ennui of these circumstances. It might not have always been pretty, but most musicians adapted and some have thrived.
Where many releases have suffered under the weight of that compromise, Loviet took it as an opportunity to see what worked. After all, as a general rule, you generally only ever get to release one full-length debut album during a pandemic. Why not go a little crazy with it? As a result, 777—despite what appears to be a solidly consistent release, takes some chances with Loviet exploring some possibilities and putting them all out there.
“I’ve been able to process so much in the last year. Writing is usually a big therapy session with myself but sometimes I reserve those songs for only me, and once it’s out of my system I can go on and do co-writing sessions covering up those parts, only writing from the perspective that I want people to see. I felt like the last few years I’ve just had to feel out the room and figure out what part of me can fit into the situation, sacrificing some of myself along the way,” says Natalie Lynn, AKA Loviet.
“This record was a big step up towards not giving a fuck about the room, loosening up to bring all of me and my baggage to the table, and see what happens. It’s felt more and more freeing to lean into my own instincts, having a small but supportive team backing my decisions. So much has happened on my way here that I had to reverse engineer where I started out in music years ago playing my guitar alone in my room writing songs for the love of it. So these songs are just like that, back at the beginning and more of me. Each song is like its own ride but it’s all from the same theme park. I’m really excited about where they will go, and what’s next from here.”
With most of the songs having been written in 2020—we saw the first single release in December with “Dullshine”—Loviet says that she took advantage of the unusual circumstances to clear her head and rediscover what it was that she loved about making music, particularly without any outside influences. Apparently, it’s one thing to have the immediate affirmation of a crowd in front of you, it’s another thing entirely to feel out the merits of your own work. The inevitable second-guessing aside, the time away in relative solitude helped Loviet to strengthen her sense of herself as an artist.
“A lot of these tracks have given me a little boost I needed in my own direction going forward to my next project, to trust my own guts and my taste as an artist. It’s really validating to have people connect with the same things I connect with especially after many years of being in rooms and being unsure if my voice should rub against someone else’s or if I’m out of my mind for loving something that someone else might not,” says Loviet.
“It’s been a real journey and I spent so many early years making songs, trying to record a record, throwing things away, this feels like a long time coming and I can’t wait to see how this shapes my moves on the next project.”
Where Everyone Know The Thrill When It’s Over, Loviet’s three-song EP released mid-2020, proved a point, 777 took that point and ran wild with it.
“Everyone Know The Thrill When It’s Over felt like one cohesive roller coaster ride while this album kind of feels like the ‘theme park’ where that body of work came from,” explains Loviet. “It’s like these tracks are all their own thing, instead of having a seamless roll into each other, and I kinda dug doing that and having the freedom to mess around in the studio on sounds and styles. We definitely took creating this, especially while in a lockdown, as a bit of a free card to throw things at the wall and see what stuck in terms of moving a more pop direction or copping from influences that are more guilty pleasures than anything else.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the album explores themes like romanticized nostalgia and young rebellion. If Loviet was going to take a shot at an album, knowing full well that success might mean compromising her message on future projects, there’s an expectation that she might wander off into left field while she still had the opportunity.
“Dullshine,” in particular, addresses this with a whole single about learning to get out of her own way. It’s a personal outpouring of recycled cringe moments that have been compounded into hang-ups and learned behaviour that leads to holding yourself back. It plays out like a break-up song, but Loviet was only breaking up with that past version of herself.
If “Dullshine” is a lesson in not looking back, “Jawbreaker” is the inverse of that and the realization that moving forward through success only leads to whatever the next challenge is. It’s the tale of Sisyphus, but rather than the stone rolling back down the hill whenever he nears the top, there’s just always more hill to climb and the rock is nothing but our own sense of dissatisfaction.
“Chemical” takes a much more romanticized view of Loviet’s past self than “Dullshine” does. The bright and poppy single bounces back to being a teenager, albeit with the benefit of some rose-coloured nostalgia. But hey, life is messy and our perspectives can contain a multitude of truths. If a Tale of Two Cities can be both the best and worst of times, you can certainly slap a synth-powered soundtrack on your youth and call it “complicated” while dancing along to it. It definitely makes for the catchiest track on the album.
If there’s a single that epitomizes the complexity of that perspective with a troubled sense of prescience, it’s “Picture.” Loviet artfully jabs at the dominant role social media has come to play in our lives with exactly the sort of subtly that a Neil Young protest song entirely lacks. Without getting heavy-handed she questions at which point does our virtual reality supersede everything else (cue the Metaverse), and to what extent, as active users, are we contributing to our own demise?
With a music video shot on her recent trip to LA, Loviet goes hard on the late ’80s vibes with “Pull Up”—directly tapping into Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the chorus—as she dives headfirst into the missteps of infatuation. “Pull Up” gets into some big hooks while taking us on the rollercoaster of a relationship that changes course before we get through the third verse. “Make Me Wanna Die” turns that theme on its head, however, with a single that sounds like we’re going full Romeo and Juliet without the tragic ending.
777 is rounded out with the rare upbeat party finishing track, “Feelbad4it”—which is enough to unpack on its for just for eschewing spaces. It’s made all the more profound for sounding like a combination of Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” and Bo Burnham’s “All Eyes on Me” on steroids. It revisits elements from her track “Chemical” and ends the album on a high note, wrapping up the best parts of 777 in one bright and shiny ’80s-laced conclusion.
If 777 is Loviet letting scattershot fly, I daresay she’s hit the mark. If anything, it errs on the side of being hooky rather than fully committing to her left turns, and that seems like an overly nitpicky thing to pick up on. 777 might pull a few punches, but it should be a clear indicator that Loviet can trust in her own voice without playing second fiddle to her own production on the next one.
Tour Dates
12.09.21 – Ottawa, ON @ Club SAW w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
12.10.21 – Montreal, QC @ Piranha Bar w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
12.11.21 – Quebec City, QC @ L’Anti w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
12.12.21 – Kingston, ON @ Mansion w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
12.15.21 – Barrie, ON @ Queens w/ Texas King
12.16.21 – Hamilton, ON @ Bridgeworks w/ Texas King
12.17.21 – Kitchener, ON @ Prohibition Warehouse w/ Texas King
12.18.21 – London, ON @ London Music Hall w/ Texas King, Sam Coffey
01.19.22 – Guelph, ON @ The Onyx w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
01.20.22 – Peterborough, ON @ Red Dog w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
01.21.22 – Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern w/ Texas King, Motherfolk
02.09.22 – London, UK @ The Shacklewell Arms
02.10.22 – Birmingham, UK @ The Victoria
02.11.22 – Manchester, UK @ Gullivers
02.15.22 – Stockholm, SE @ Obaren
02.17.22 – Warsaw, @ Chmury
02.18.22 – Krakow, PL @ Szpitalna