LAND OF TALK - LASTS LAND OF TALK

Land of Talk is still here. That wasn’t always a guarantee. Over the multi-faceted twenty year history of their project, Lizzie Powell has drifted from and back to music, always interrogating their role as an artist. In the time since 2023’s Performances, they found themselves utterly worn down by the vicissitudes of the music industry and wracked with worry around their aging parents. Yet the music didn’t stop: Powell heard songs in traffic and in birds chirping, in their downstairs neighbor’s daily prayers and in the babble of children on the street. Melodies slowly cohered over time. “Life can become so unbearable, and music is where I go to metabolize it,” they explain. “I know the music was the only thing that was going to help me.” Soon Powell reemerged with the sixth Land of Talk album, LASTS.

LASTS is full of double meanings — both resilience and finality, acting as a noun and a verb. Though LASTS is haunted by crises including climate collapse, political upheaval, and genocide, the mangitude of global turmoil led Powell towards smaller, humane depictions of suffering and grief. As both their parents became ill, Powell reflected on the last time a person might walk, might talk to a loved one. Yet watching their parents near the other side of life’s arc also made Powell consider all they had survived across their own decades on this earth, their new songs channeling both gratitude and rage. LASTS became a phrase, honoring Land of Talk’s circuitous route and all Powell’s reckoned with through the years. “I think of this record as a love letter to life,” they say.

With everything that’s happened since Land of Talk’s 2006 EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss and 2008 debut LP Some Are Lakes, Powell would know something about writing a letter to life. Back then, Powell was thrown into the hotbed of indie blog buzz, tied to an array of fellow ascendant Canadian acts in Montreal’s ‘00s scene. Land of Talk soon broke off on their own, following no clean narrative consigned to scene, era, or genre. After a hiatus in the ‘10s, Powell returned to making music with 2017’s Life After Youth, following it with 2020’s Indistinct Conversations and then Performances. With each album, Powell reimagined their approach to songwriting, all while simultaneously celebrating a new freedom after coming out as non-binary and wrestling with the lingering traumas of existing as a non-cis male in the music industry. LASTS picks up where its predecessors left off, wielding unflinching honesty, pensive empathy, and righteous anger alike.

For Powell, songwriting is a slow process of pulling ideas from the ether — a constant, fluid conversation rather than abrupt flashes of inspiration or any kind of prompt-driven session. Eventually, they collect stray chords and melodies from a trove of voice memos, distilling and often narrowing to a particular instrument — synths on Life After Youth, acoustic guitar on Indistinct Conversations, piano on Performances, and now the smaller parlor acoustic for the intimacy of LASTS.

The eight songs on LASTS travel through everything that was on Powell’s mind in these years: sexual abuse and grooming in the music industry, the sharp polarity of the beauty they see in their artist peers and the toxicity they see in industry power brokers, the mortality of their parents (“Funeral clothes have been packed a few times,” they say of various close calls), the ongoing process of understanding their identity as a non-binary person. They often forge ahead with the songs in hopes of communing with others who have experienced the same: “Music is medicine for me, and I know that if this song helps me feel better, maybe someone else will feel heard and understood.”

These were deeply personal new songs even by Land of Talk’s standards, and Powell knew they could only be brought to life with trusted collaborators including drummer Michael Belyea and guitarist/bassist/engineer Michael Feuerstack — a longtime friend, consigliere, and influence for Powell. The trio gathered in a cabin in Harrington, a rural region of Quebec two hours northwest of Montreal. “It was important I felt super safe, and I just wanted to make this record with people where I didn’t have to worry about being misunderstood or objectified,” Powell asserts. They arrived with bare-bones demos, and then let the songs reveal themselves over a ten-day session during which most of LASTS was tracked. Though there is a raw, in-the-room quality that conjures the scrappier rock of early Land of Talk albums, there’s also a humid, dreamlike quality to the performances — a sense that something new is gradually emerging over the course of each song, just as Powell’s writing had rested on nothing being certain aside from the magic and mystery of how the ideas arrived to them.

The end result is an album both lean and winding, allowing Powell’s words and melodies to take centerstage, uncrowded in visceral, shot-no-chaser arrangements. LASTS jumps right in with “Broken Tongue,” a wiry track built on thrumming electric guitar and ghostly synths as Powell rails against the lack of justice for victims of abuse. The trio’s interplay is readily evident in “Saffron” and “4:44,” two earworm songs that also allow themselves to unspool into extended instrumental codas. Early in the record, there are seething tracks like “Dogs” — “Just your basic instinct / Even dogs know better,” Powell growls in the chorus, before the song quiets into a plaintive plea of “Leave us alone now” — and later there are more vulnerable, wandering moments. In “Projections” and “Cedars,” Powell ventures deep into their head, inviting their co-conspirators and listeners alike to follow the songs wherever they meander.

If there’s an end to the journey of LASTS, it’s in the willful imperfection of its closing title track. Powell allowed the song to sit, with all its uncalculated breaths and lack of resolution. That, to them, was part of the point — frustration that some things can never be resolved beyond the recognition we’re not alone, or that we need to keep moving while carrying everything from our past. “I have this sense that everything is unraveling, decaying,” Powell concludes. “These songs are me trying to stay safe, to ride right in the barrel of the wave.” That poignant final image defines LASTS. Drawing upon everything Land of Talk and Powell have been in two decades, the album becomes a document of the simple yet implausible act of survival.