Seventeen years on from ‘Bulletproof’, La Roux’s Elly Jackson has said the quiet part out loud: the song that made her famous also broke her.
‘I literally wrote and sung this song, lost my voice, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for 10 years,’
Jackson posted this month, addressing the fallout from her breakout 2009 single more directly than she ever has before. It isn’t a tidy, one-line story: Jackson kept making music in fits and starts across that stretch, with ‘Trouble in Paradise’ arriving in 2014 and ‘Supervision’ following in 2020, right as the pandemic cancelled the tour that was meant to go with it. But her own framing of it, a decade she’s only now naming as lost to a breakdown, is the most candid she’s been about what those years actually cost her.
Speaking to AnOther Magazine last month, Jackson described the aftermath of ‘Supervision’ in similarly blunt terms. ‘I’d only just finished it when the pandemic hit, so I wasn’t ready to start making a new record instantly,’ she said. ‘It took a couple of years to know if I even wanted to make another record or if there was any point.’
That question has an answer now. ‘Old Flames’, La Roux’s fourth studio album, arrives on 6 November via Vertigo Records, and by Jackson’s own account it’s the record where she stops circling the subject. It takes on the collapse of a 17-year relationship, addiction, loneliness and reconciling her sexuality and identity in public, with nods to David Lynch and ‘Donnie Darko’ worked into the lyrics. Recent single ‘Lose Myself’ went further still, revealing an auADHD diagnosis and a history of addiction Jackson had never discussed publicly. She’s described the album as an attempt at ‘processing why I’ve behaved the way that I have’, and as a deliberate farewell to the patterns that got her there.
Two more singles, ‘Cabin Fever’ and ‘Babyline’, are already out ahead of the album, and if they’re any guide, ‘Old Flames’ isn’t going to soften any of this for radio. For an artist who helped define a whole strand of UK synth-pop off the back of one song, it’s a much bigger risk to make the follow-up about the cost of that song instead.
‘Old Flames’ is out 6 November via Vertigo Records.
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