The top outcome? Six slick, fashionable, and deliciously moody tracks that discover the shadowy corners of need, fame, and sexuality. There’s the wildly catchy opener “More durable to Attain Than God,” on which she delivers a winking come-on to a lover, and the eerie, noirish “Scream,” on which she sweetly sings about having a “famous person” locked within the trunk of her automotive. A specific spotlight is the scuzzy, electrical guitar-led “Perpetually,” with its lyrics charting a harmful romance—mysterious snippets of which really feel like they’re being glimpsed by means of the shimmer of a sizzling, hazy day in Los Angeles—over swirling synths and a hyperactive, distorted beat. (“In the event you fucked me without end / in your denim and leather-based,” she sings, with a delicate growl. “In the event you fucked me without end / don’t you assume I’d really feel higher?”)
The EP has quiet echoes of different artists who’ve each romanticized and subverted the clichés of California life—Courtney Love and Lana Del Rey each spring to thoughts—however Avalon’s melting pot of sonic influences is altogether her personal, with traces of grunge, ’00s indie, and synth-pop all whizzed up right into a silky, seductive bundle. Like most artists of her era, nonetheless, Avalon doesn’t fear about style all that a lot. “After I take into consideration style, I don’t essentially consider a sound, however extra in regards to the subcultures they sprang from,” she says. “I believe we’re now dwelling in a type of post-subculture world due to the web, and quite a lot of artists aren’t actually conforming to style. I suppose I used to be actually impressed by a few of my contemporaries that simply make music from the guts, as corny or trite as which may sound. I believe that’s an important factor. I don’t take into consideration style a lot as I take into consideration honesty.”
Picture: Gaylord Studios
Picture: Gaylord Studios
This fluid method to creating music may be chalked up, a minimum of partly, to Avalon’s upbringing. She notes that her mother and father had her once they have been 18 and 20, and when she was rising up in Santa Ana, they’d usually take her to gigs, the place she absorbed an eclectic vary of sounds—new wave, post-punk, electroclash. By the point she was a young person, she was already performing in punk bands. (She even co-founded the very first Dying Grips fan membership together with her pal Jarrod.) Earlier than lengthy although, she wished to strike out on her personal. “I’m a management freak,” she says with amusing. “I at all times knew that I wanted to have full autonomy over the work and each side of the music I used to be making.”
As a first-generation Chicana, equally central to her inventive identification is her Mexican heritage. “I believe the Chicano neighborhood is among the driving forces of other and post-punk and goth music,” she says. “Plenty of these artists have been held up by Chicanos: Morrissey and the Smiths, the Treatment, Depeche Mode. These are all bands that my uncles hearken to. Although they’re from England, for some motive, their music simply resonated with us—I believe as a result of it’s so dramatic, it reminds us of Vicente [Fernández] or Luis Miguel. It’s so passionate and romantic. I suppose that’s how I really feel about life too.”
