LVA GRL Wants You To Embrace The Pain That Comes With Healing
Photo by Deborah Grosmark / Courtesy of the artist
“I think it might be sad boy season … ”
“Sad boy season?”
“Yeah, do you know what that means?”
“What does that mean?”
“I think it means I’m gonna be spiraling and spiraling and spiraling for no goddamn reason!”
The bass and drum kick into crescendo as the crowd excitedly screams for LVA GRL (pronounced “lava girl”), their voices steadily rising over the reverb, resounding through the main stage at New York City’s Bowery Electric on a calm and chilly February night. The genderfluid and queer musician is playing their first show of 2022 with a set list composed of old songs and new tracks off their new EP, Sad Boy Szn, out today. LVA GRL’s voice effortlessly transitions from the lowest part of their range to the highest, and back again. It’s the perfect personification of the EP’s theme: how there’s no real start or end to battling mental illness. The war with one’s own mind is a continuum.
Forced to think of new ways to showcase their craft during the first year of the pandemic, LVA GRL taught themself how to use Adobe After Effects and Premiere. They created their own animated lyric videos for their singles, such as the infamous “Cigarette Boy,” from their 2020 EP Therapy and 2021’s moody “Healthy Girls.” LVA GRL’s hauntingly poetic lyrics paint vivid images, while familiar sounds such as the crunch of a Cheeto or the bubbling of a bong rip are sometimes woven into the instrumentals. The artist credits their alt-pop musical tastes to their cross-genre household, with a dad who listened to a lot of Incubus, Evanescence, and Smashing Pumpkins, and a mom who was more into Ingrid Michaelson, Regina Spektor and Sara Bareilles. LVA GRL is also classically trained in opera, having started their training in high school while they were also involved in musical theater. Sad Boy Szn is LVA GRL’s Amy Lee moment, their sonic and songwriting influences shining through clearly.
LVA GRL sat down with Sunstroke contributor Anna Sejuelas to discuss Sad Boy Szn and the importance of showing the dark realities of mental illness and healing from trauma, not just the pretty parts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2020, you released your EP Therapy, and now you've come out with Sad Boy Szn. Some people might look at that and think it's kind of backwards, but I feel like for people who struggle with mental illness, it makes sense.
Yeah, because healing isn't linear and we're foolish if we expect it to be. Especially when you can be working on healing, but that doesn't stop life from happening around you. That doesn't stop things from being shitty.
Tell me about where you were when you wrote Therapy and where you were when you wrote Sad Boy Szn.
When I wrote Therapy, it was the transition from high school to college, moving out of my hometown, and entering into a toxic relationship. And then by the time it came out, leaving that relationship. It was a SparkNotes of some of the emotions and some of the experiences that I had had up to that point, what that transition felt like. I had a friend pass away while I was writing Therapy, and we had four songs, but after she passed away, I wrote a fifth (“Dear Grief”). She killed herself. It really put into perspective how even though we're young, we're not immortal. It was coming to terms with mortality, and that idea didn't necessarily show itself in Therapy, because the initial processing of that was what took place during that EP.
But then you can sort of see in my music after that, with “Healthy Girls” and with “Bittersweet,” how I was trying to adjust the way that I was viewing and experiencing life, because if my friend can pass away at 20, 21, 22 like ... I'm that old, too. I want to make the most out of this time that I have, because who knows how long I'll have it? This two-to-three-year period has been the most intensely reflective I've been in my life. This year, I've had a lot of people around me pass away or become very, very ill. It's just been more and more of that perspective: okay, those lights are gone, so what is my light? What is my life?
With Sad Boy Szn, I've been in a really interestingly dark spot the last few months and all of the songs I wrote during that time were all like brand new lyric sets. I guess in that way, it's different because Therapy was more retrospective, which is why I think Therapy was such a good title for it. And Sad Boy Szn is what's happening right now; it's more of an active processing.
You've been very vocal about your intention for this album, which is encouraging your listeners to embrace the pain that comes with healing because it’s uncomfortable. But it is one of the most inevitable parts of healing, and that’s not widely spoken about. There's a stigma surrounding talking about painful emotions that demand to be felt.
That stigma just doesn't exist in my brain. I have zero issue talking about mental health, zero bars holding me back. So that's why I want to do it, and why I think it's so important for me to do it because it shouldn't be taboo. Because I think that comes from that romanticization, that glorification of mental illness. Mainstream media is showing either somebody completely healed, without showing the process of that healing, or showing somebody who's going through something, but they're only showing the pretty parts. And it's not pretty.
Our mental health doesn't exist to be perceived by others. It’s nobody's mission, if they have these mental illnesses, to highlight these things that they're going through, that is no one's obligation. But I do think it does need to be talked about, whether it's by professionals, or whether it's by me sitting in my room crying and writing a song. It's whether people feel comfortable to not have that privacy in that healing. And I think that's why it's also so hard to not feel like you're even crazier, on top of having a mental illness, because nobody talks about that side of it. But it's not crazy.
The sounds that you add to your songs are all really fun, like the sound of the water pipe in “Breathe Underwater” on Sad Boy Szn, and the car horns in “Small Car Small Heart” on Therapy. When you're writing a song, do those kinds of details come to you when you write the lyrics, or are those the last things you think of?
In “Small Car Small Heart,” I was like, “it'd be kind of fun to have a car noise in that one” when I came into the studio, because I go into every studio session with the songs completely written because I'm not trying to spend money to write my own song. So that was a choice that I made when we started that song. But with “Breathe Underwater,” we were in my producer's home studio, and he took a hit from his bong. And I was like, “Hey Brandon, what if we cut that up and put it in the song?” And we did. We went through the song, and I was like, “Put this part of the hit here, cut out the toke inwards, put that there, take the lighter flick, put it here, take the breath in, take the sound of the green burning, put it there.” This is the most intentioned way I've done this in a song. I wanted to influence the way the listener breathes while listening to the song. So, by incorporating these sounds, if you are a smoker and you smoke out of a bong, your brain recognizes where you're at in that process. The beginning of the song, it's that one breath looped inwards so that you don't feel like you can physically breathe out, take a breath, until the end. I really wanted to control the way breath was experienced in this song because it’s about feeling like you're suffocating.
I want to talk about “Oh God.” It's inspired by a poem you wrote in eighth grade and the lyrics in the second verse, “I only find dead ends, like dead ends of my hair, lifeless and uneven” are directly from it. When you were thinking of that song, was there a conscious decision to look back at that specific poem?
I opened the poem (titled “I”) in Google Docs and was like, “I want a fifth song.” And then I read the poem, and copy and pasted some of my favorite lines that I wrote from that. And I put it in where I type up all my lyrics and wrote from there.
Even the last line of “I,” “are you finally listening?” was directly placed into “Oh God.” I really wanted to do that because depression isn't something that goes away. You can't be cured of it. You can learn to live with it, and it can still be there, but it's not like there's a way to magically cure a chemical imbalance in your brain. You can make it better to the point where it's negligible, but it's not something that just goes away permanently; it goes away for a period and you're okay for X number of months, days, or years and then it comes back full force.
In some of your songs on Sad Boy Szn, you use pronouns, and on some you don't. You've been very open about how your exploration of gender identity has been extremely important for you. How was that shown on Sad Boy Szn?
In “Breathe Underwater,” I intentionally had “girl” and “her” because that song is also about losing this old version of yourself, like, “I've lost my claim to womanhood, I'm not a woman.” This experience, that has been the female experience, it's still something that I have experienced, but I'm not a woman. It’s also that “Okay, so then what am I, how do I exist?” That is also a context with which the lyrics can be looked at and analyzed in a whole different way, through that lens of gender exploration and crisis. But then in “Spiral,” I don't use any pronouns because it's not about navigating gender identity.
My use in this EP, and going forward, of gendered pronouns is very specific. It’s because I want people to think about things in a specific way, so that's why “Spiral” is just about mental illness. In “Oh God” it's just about me, they, that is the kid. Instead of in the original poem, where that line originally was: “who is the girl?” I'm not a girl, so this is what that is, and in “Breathe Underwater” it's “shot her,” like the woman version of LVA GRL is dead. She's dead and gone, and gender fluidity is here to stay!
Can you describe Sad Boy Szn as if you’re young LVA, listening to you for the first time?
It ... feels like I'm listening to someone who finally understands. I didn't make a single, real, true friend that I could share everything about myself with until I left for college and moved to the city. For like, 18, 19 years of my life, I couldn't talk to my family. I couldn't talk to friends. I was just there, solitary. That’s also a big motivator for me to release music like this because nobody should have to experience life the way I experienced it.
Keep up with LVA GRL on Instagram and TikTok. Listen to their new EP, Sad Boy Szn, wherever you stream your music.