🎟️ GIVEAWAY ALERT! 🎟️
We’re giving away pairs of tickets to see La Roux at The Depot on February 13! 🔥
Tune in around 3PM and listen for Dylan’s Question of the Day. Answer it for your chance to win a pair! 🎶
📻 Mix 105.1
⏰ Around 3PM
🎟️ La Roux at The Depot — February 13
Good luck! 🤞
She’s the Grammy-winning producer, songwriter, and performer who has worked with Tyler, The
Creator, CASISDEAD, Skream and Skrillex and sold millions of records across the globe.
Yet, judging by her new work, the best is yet to come for La Roux who returns with a fiercely
redemptive fourth record that overturns expectations of both the artist and her sound.
Old Flames is
an emotionally expansive reckoning that moves through rebirth and renewal, doubt and acceptance,
pulsing with longing and desire, isolation, tenderness and devastation. It’s an immediate and intimate
record that sinks inside the skin from the first listen.
It is, says the South Londoner with a grin, her “phoenix rising from the ashes” moment. A new era, a
new perspective. It’s a brilliant, imaginative, cinematic record whose references include David Lynch
and Donnie Darko, All Saints and Mariah Carey alongside her jeep and summertime rain. It’s
nostalgic, immersive, future facing and completely and utterly true to La Roux.
Written in the midst of heartache, hibernation and self-immolation,
Old Flames is a circulatory story,
beginning at the end before dissecting all that’s come before. This is an album built for replay,
revealing new layers with each return. And while
Old Flames burns down the past, it also clears space
for something new: new sounds, new freedoms, new ways of living and loving.
Composed, written, produced, and arranged by La Roux, the album is a self-possessed statement
from an artist whose compositional talent has been underestimated for far too long. Its confidence is
undeniable, but the power of
Old Flames lies in its candour, creativity and imagination. Across the
album, she confronts the collapse of a 17-year relationship, the ache of forbidden love, the loneliness
of addiction and the struggle to reconcile sexuality and identity beneath the glare of public scrutiny.
No longer hiding in plain sight, she has shed the quiff, the sunglasses and sharp tailoring. In its place
stands a softer, wittier, more self-realised and transparent artist, one unafraid to be seen in full.
“I realised I needed to let people in more,” says La Roux. “I was burying meaning in metaphors where
even I couldn’t see what I was saying. It’s a relief to just say what I mean.” It is, for instance, the
first time she’s written romantic songs using she/her pronouns. “This record says things how they
are: how I am and who I am. It’s been a process of admitting what I got wrong through telling these
tales and coming to terms with where I am now.
Old Flames is essentially me processing why I’ve
behaved the way that I have and saying goodbye to it. It’s a farewell to that way of behaving in love
and life. And in music too.”
The seeds of
Old Flames were planted nearly five years ago on the piano in La Roux’s Brixton kitchen.
She had just independently released 2020’s
Supervision – an album lost in the haze of lockdown –
when her personal life began to shift too. Though they would stay together for four more years, it
was the beginning of the end of her relationship with the woman she had loved since she was 20
years-old.
“She was my best friend from school and later my girlfriend, fiancée and muse. Nearly every song I
wrote was about her, in some way. We kept our relationship private because I thought being gay was
the least interesting thing about me and I also wanted my private life to stay private. But keeping that
secret meant I could never fully open up about my lyrical content. As devastated as I was, I realised I
had the opportunity to be honest for the first time. I knew that would make the music stronger.”
The songwriter in La Roux wanted to make sense of the rupture through music and so began with the
sound. “I’m a producer first,” she says. She needed a sonic architecture sturdy enough to hold the
hardest story she’d ever told. But she wasn’t interested in excavating the electronic disco-style music
that had so informed her first three records, which include the Grammy-winning
La Roux (2009) and
follow-up’s
Trouble In Paradise (2014) and
Supervision (2020).
Immersing herself in seventies and eighties soul and late nineties to early-2000s R&B, she dissected
her favourite records to inform the spirit of the album. While still, essentially, a pop record,
Old
Flames leans much more into R&B and hip-hop palettes. “There’s something about that music, and
that time, that is so much more cinematic than pop music today for me.” Nineties touchstones like All
Saints, Michael Jackson, TLC, SWV, Tamia and Mariah Carey ripple throughout. “I was also interested
in interpreting the nineties, visually and musically, because I think it’s the last time when the world
wasn’t really fucking scary. It was pre-internet, pre-phones, pre-social media, pre-financial crash. I
wanted that nostalgia, but I wanted it to feel current too.”
With most of the lyrics written, La Roux spent the next couple of years finessing, completing a sketch
of the record in 2024. Right before the breakup of her relationship. After a lengthy grieving period,
she returned to mix and master with engineer Martin Eden with fresh ears, re-recording vocals,
improving choruses, tidying up certain sections and arrangements. After finally finding the right
record label to release the album with,
Old Flames was delivered in December 2025.
It opens cinematically with the ‘Intro’: rain lashes against a windscreen, wipers swipe, a lighter
sparks into life, a cassette is inserted, and we hear a snippet of a song as we prepare to drive to…
destination unknown. Inspired by Hop-Hop’s predilection for interludes, specifically
The Miseducation
Of Lauryn Hill, the scene mirrors La Roux’s own life at that time. “I love that Lauryn created so many
situational landscapes that she puts you in. I really wanted to bring the listener to where I was; your
life packed up in the back of a car, contemplating what’s next.”
Written in a sudden burst of inspiration, La Roux was sitting in her newly painted living room, gazing
lovingly out of the window at her new purchase, a second-hand jeep. “The moment I said those
words out loud – ‘old flames, burn out’ – I went to the piano and wrote the song in fifteen minutes.”
Its message is simple and hard-won: everything passes. Everything changes. And that’s okay.
First single, the glorious, dramatically claustrophobic ‘Cabin Fever’ with its nods to All Saints drops
us straight into self-imposed hibernation—racing thoughts, excuses, the seduction of staying inside.” I
always say I’ve never been depressed but I probably was. Being inside felt safer.”
‘Lose Myself’ channels the frenetic drama of mid-90s Michael Jackson ‘Earth Song’ and the Janet
duet ‘Scream’ as La Roux reflects on years of weed dependency – something she now recognises –
following an auADHD diagnosis, as self-medication: ‘
I wanted you so much, your love just keeps me
holding on, and now I want to leave, just come and beam me up’. ‘Lose Myself’ reads like a love
song but its yearning is chemical. The tension between escape and entrapment pulses throughout.
The album is intersected by the utterly gorgeous ‘To Make Our Love’, an immediate, festival-ready
earworm that belies its grief. The breakthrough came via sampling Mai Tai’s ‘Losing You Forever’
which became the backbone of the track and the emotional centrepiece of the album. Set in a deeper
vocal register, it traces the arc of a relationship from euphoric beginning to inevitable end. “It’s a
montage of the love of my life. The line ‘
feels like you’re slipping right out of my life’ unfortunately
came true. But the celebration is still there too, creating a melancholy I still find hard to process.”
Another highlight is ‘Night Vision’, a homage to Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker” with its pitched
down vocal recalling the classic duet. The Ragga-R&B inflected ‘Your Lover’ and sleazy slo-mo
sounds of ‘Final Fantasy’ tap into longing and lust, a desire often directed toward women she
couldn’t have. “I’ve lived in these fantasy worlds, which has allowed me to channel all of this weird
energy that doesn’t have an outlet anywhere else, into music.”
Later, ‘Babyline’ finds redemption, release, renewal. As well as heartbreak, the album confronts a
decade plus of industry disappointments; male collaborators taking credit, bad deals, broken trust.
And sets fire to those flames of disappointment. “I’ve had a rough ten years,” she admits. “I was
magnetising everything that I didn’t need for a long time – you also do have to take responsibility at
some point. This record is me admitting what I got wrong and moving forward.”
The album closes where we began, with the title track, ‘Old Flames’, the fully realised version we
first heard on the “Intro”.
“I’ve gotten rid of a lot of the baggage that was weighing me down. I’m saying goodbye to the
previous permutation of La Roux. I’m walking through the world a lot lighter. And I want people to
feel lighter at the end of the album too. Like they want to listen to the record all over again.”
Meticulously crafted yet free of excess, this is a deeply considered offering rich in meaning and ideas,
without feeling overworked. It’s a triumphant return from a multi-award-winning composer who sold
over two million albums in the US alone and worked with some of the world’s most influential
musicians; DnB frontrunner Zinc reworked
Bulletproof, while dubstep pioneer Skream and Grammy
winner Skrillex both remixed
In For The Kill; she later worked with Skream on his second album,
2010’s
Outside The Box.
In 2019, she featured alongside guests including Solange and Lil Uzi Vert on Tyler, The Creator’s
boundary-breaking album
Igor. The following year, Tyler remixed La Roux’s “Automatic Driver” from
her third album,
Supervision. In 2021, she worked with reclusive rapper Casisdead on “Park Assist”,
featuring alongside the BRIT winner in the video directed by
Deadpool baddie Ed Skrien.
Her work continues to inspire and influence other artists; French Montana, Tion Wayne, Mavado and
Major Lazer are just some of the acts who have sampled La Roux’s work.
“I want this to solidify my position as an artist, a composer and producer,” says La Roux of this fourth
album. “I want to be seen for who I am and what I’m capable of. I didn’t spend five years on and off
taking my time making this because I think it’s mediocre. I made it to be joyous and immersive,
something people can move through and come out feeling changed by. I want people to feel like the
Phoenix rising at the end. And if they don’t,” she laughs, “that’s fine too. Just have fun listening.”
MIX LA ROUX CONTEST RUNS FROM 10/05-10/09. MIX WILL PROMPT LISTENERS TO TUNE IN AROUND 3P AND WAIT FOR THE CUE TO CALL AND CORRECTLY ANSWER THE QUESTION OF THE DAY. DATA & MESSAGE RATES MAY APPLY. A WINNER WILL BE SELECTED AT RANDOM AT EACH INSTANCE OF THE CONTEST TO WIN 2 TICKETS TO LA ROUX AT THE DEPOT ON FEBRUARY 13. EACH PRIZE IS PROVIDED BY LIVE NATION. PRIZE VALUED: $80. MESSAGE AND DATA RATES MAY APPLY AND YOU MAY RECEIVE UP TO 2 TEXT PER REQUEST. THESE RULES ARE IN ADDITION TO BROADWAY MEDIA’S GENERAL CONTEST RULES.
