Lupa J: To Breathe Underwater | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- According to Lupa J, metaphors of water have, lately, just kept bubbling up in their work, leaking into the lyrics and condensing like a cold sweat on the brain. Carl Jung identified water as a symbol for the unconscious: a sea of unknown desires, trauma lurking below the surface and hidden psychology that our conscious mind is constantly wrestling with, trying to keep it all bottled up. We wouldn’t need psychoanalysts if such a thing were possible, maybe not art either, but here we are with jets of Lupa J’s emotion spraying out of their new album, as they plunge into that symbolic landscape and try To Breathe Underwater.

2020 has not been a great year for emotional stability and Lupa’s featured an abortive move from Sydney to Melbourne, which ended back in Sydney, writing songs about frustrated desire and the pain of separation. Much of the new record grapples with uneasy attraction, uncomfortably blurred boundaries and an unnamed other. As Lupa puts it: “I have this overpowering part of myself that often desperately wants to become encompassed in another person.” The tensions with a self in flux, with a new partner and at trying to live in a new place, jostle for space here. Sometimes it becomes such a fracas that they seem to blur, one into another and you can’t tell which is which. On Supermarket Riots  there’s “A stranger in my mind” and you may be caught wondering if it’s that invisible other Lupa’s begging to “Just stay on the phone, I need you” or if it’s the difficult relationship Lupa is having with themself: “Is this me? / Is this me? / Is this what I want to be”. Fair enough, having only recently adopted gender-non-binary pronouns, fluxing boundaries and fluidity of identity are as wholly appropriate as they are liminal and queer. The whole lot spills back into the rest of the roiling, oceanic symbolism, like “a sea of frightened eyes” in the panicked, pandemic crowds.

Much like its predecessor, Swallow Me Whole, To Breathe Underwater splits its time between electronic pop and pretty hard-edged dance music. If I had to say though, Lupa J seems more comfortable with the pop now: it’s lusher and sounds just that little bit more mass-market friendly; more Washington than Grimes? That’s a bit nonsensical when you consider how popular Grimes is and, anyway, the dance on cuts like Call Me Up is brutal, shuddering with industrial power. Also, even at some of this record’s poppier moments, Lupa fearlessly explores their darkest thoughts. Perfect Weekend, for instance, might sound a bit like Evanescence but goes much bleaker than those pop-goths ever did: “One pill to make the world end / I wreck the perfect weekend / It’s getting hard to leave my body be / Four weeks before I see you / Is this what I would choose? / Is it too much to face reality?”

The storm of emotion eases as the record progresses, a cut like The Suburb exhibits a singer-songwriter intimacy and the smoothest sailing of the record: “For this minute we freeze time / And kiss with our best side / I walk down to the water / For now at least the floating still feels nice.” Well it may be only that minute: even before it heads into the home stretch and final number, You, the levels of tension are rising again, nostalgia giving way to reality. There is no peace, but there is honesty, a recognition of the impermanence of relationships and that even the self, which we’re stuck with, is in relentless flux: “I hate to feel you fade / Cause what I feel / Is so new / I’m so untouchable and changing / I dance and I fall / Back into your arms / Still always new and deviating.”

It’s only ever in dreams -and remarkably few of those- that I’ve been able to breathe underwater. Peace itself can seem like a fleeting dream, especially when it may only be found in the inky depths of a mind we will never truly know. Lupa J can only try and plumb the depths and chart her progress, transforming the churning of a mind into turbulent music. Catharsis is one of music’s gifts: it speaks the pain and heartache so we don’t have to any longer. We may never still the unquiet, emotional realm, but the more the music rages, for me at least, the calmer my waters are.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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