In the hands of the right lyricist, a few minutes worth of song can be the equivalent of great existential treatise, as when Don Henley asks, “What are these voices outside love’s open door that make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?” It’s an inquiry that multi-Grammy-winning alt-pop star Lorde has called “the most incredible fucking question of the universe”. I had Lorde on my mind because I was listening to another one of pop music’s modern philosophers: Maude Latour. The Columbia University graduate-turned-Los Angeles resident invites undeniable comparison to the “Royals” singer thanks to their similarly dark and distinctive vocals; the first time I ever came across a Latour track from her first EP in 2019, I initially mistook it (in shock and alarm) for a Lorde song I had somehow never heard before.
But to be sure, Latour’s unique strain of philosophical, lightly psychedelic bedroom pop puts her in a world entirely her own — except, of course, when she opens those worlds up to her passionately loyal fanbase in the form of her music. Since her days as a teenager and then a college student in New York City, Latour has released four EPs, which she once described to me in an interview for a different publication as four interconnected pieces of one story detailing a journey through the cosmos.
Now, after the viral single “One More Weekend” and multiple legs of live shows, Latour offers her long-awaited debut album Sugar Water. She describes the record as “a theory, a hypothesis, an argument for a way of being”, explaining that the title is a reference to life itself as a brief drop of sugar water between two unknowable oblivions. Throughout the 12 songs, Latour offers a manifesto for a more mystical way of being. Even without the aggressively catchy hooks of the genre’s heaviest hitters, Latour delivers a succinct and realized vision of grandiosity and wonder.
“Loving you is dangerous / They’ll write bibles about us forever,” Maude Latour croons on Sugar Water‘s opening track, “Officially Mine”. It’s a song about youthful yearning, brimming with a desperate craving for, as another great musical thinker once put it, “something happening somewhere”. Still, the speaker realizes the risk inherent in the passion it might take to reach that high, as when Latour, sounding like she’s cupping her hand to your ear at a sleepover, sings:
Cause I dream about going too fast, something that’ll last
A classic type of record that always comes back
Glitter in your hair, diamonds in your eyes
Even when you tell me sweet lies
This might as well be the album’s thesis statement, and Latour’s attention to sonic detail to establish it immediately here is impressive: the stutter of the energetic keys on the intro, a delicious drop to a near-whisper amidst the otherwise belted chorus.
From here, Sugar Water tells the story of a journey Latour has described as falling into and back out of love and making peace with loss and the inevitable end of all things. The love story begins in earnest on “Cursed Romantics”, a MARINA-tinged dance track. I recently had a friend lament to me, “Every song now is so literal, like,” she shifted to an airy falsetto, “‘I was walking my dog at the farmers market last Thursday, and I ran into your Mo-om.'” “Cursed Romantics” has one of my favorite verses on the whole record precisely because it resists such a tendency, recalling the indie and alt-pop that Latour was raised on and frequently cites as her biggest influences. Even a subtle Shakespeare reference once might have seemed trite but now reads as refreshingly thoughtful.
As Sugar Water progresses from a story of skittering, early love to a deep and ecstatic connection, the production shifts as well. “Whirlpool” and the titular “Sugar Water” eschew a radio-friendly pop sound for more experimental vocal effects, just as true intimacy is always flat-out weirder than anyone expects. But even as Maude Latour grows more secure in her atmospheric, seemingly shimmering sound, Sugar Water‘s speaker seems to be losing their footing. Existential questions start to abound in the album’s latter half: “What do I do with the memories?”, “We were so young, so why am I still so broken-hearted?”, “Will it be enough? What if I lose myself?”, “Could you save me?”
The ethereal “Cosmic Superstar Girl” and delicate “7 (interlude)” weave tales of loss and heartbreak with images of the sublime. The faint harp sounds in the background of the latter track give me the impression of light flickering over the water’s surface. In the record’s final song, “Bloom”, Latour admits, “I don’t know much about loving forever, but I am fascinated by it entirely.” The baldness of the line may strike some as uninspired; certainly, it’s not among Sugar Water‘s most poetic lyrics. But still, the rest of the song, which is something of a spoken word track, is so entirely the essence of Maude Latour; it suggests something hard to come by in the age of social media comparison and self-doubt: a visionary willing to trust her vision.
By the time “Bloom” addresses a second person “you” in a litany of metaphors (“You are a party / You are a wave / You are a surfboard / You are a rave / You are a lighthouse / Searching in the fog / You are the last dance / And baby, you’re God”), Latour’s ambitious debut has already taken on such a massive cosmic scope that ‘you’ could be a love interest, the listener, Maude herself, or the very art she’s creating.
“No, I don’t wanna die,” Latour insists, “but I think we might.” It seems straightforward at first, but that ‘might’ feels like a tongue-in-cheek admission of how misplaced youthful feelings of invincibility can be. (These subtle complications are some of the greatest strengths of Latour’s songwriting.) Still, sometimes that naivety can be almost akin to wisdom, as when Latour sings the next line of the song — instead of wasting time worrying, wasting time on anything less than the purest cosmic sweetness that the miracle of experience can offer, she declares: “So I’ll just love you harder, taste it all like sugar water.” With a debut this decisively cohesive and self-assured, it’s impossible not to love Maude Latour just as hard in return and follow her on her journey through the Universe, wherever it leads.