HEARTCORE

Today duo Say Lou Lou finally release their debut album Lucid Dreaming. Radar sat down with Miranda and Elektra Kilbey to talk about why it took so long, why they don’t like singing in Swedish and how they just can’t write about reciprocated love.

Say Lou Lou’s debut album is now finally out. It took some time though, and the release has been postponed time after time. When Radar meet up with the two sisters at a café in Stockholm the fist question to naturally be asked was: Why the delay?
– The first reason is that we changed the name from Saint Lou Lou to Say Lou Lou. And that pushed the whole thing back. And now it’s also been delayed because we decided to release the album independently through our own label and not through Sony Columbia, Miranda explains.

The change of plans regarding the release was inevitable and is described by the two as “a divorce on mutual terms”.

– We were really depressed last year and felt that we weren’t in control of our lives. It was a situation where commerce and creativity just didn’t match, Miranda says and her sister Elektra continues:
– We didn’t like people telling us what to do, what kind of music we should be making, what we should look like and what our videos should look like. We were all pulling in different directions and in the end everybody were working against each other.

Have you gotten tired of the album since all this time has passed?
Miranda: I feel we just want to get it out. This process has been so long. It’s been really hard writing new songs because the new material needed to be adapted to work with the old material. But now that we’ve released it, we have a clean slate. We can start creating again.

Miranda and Elektra have worked with a lot of people along the way, but came back their core group of people, where you find both co-writer Janne Kask and producer duo Addeboy vs. Cliff. The album title is Lucid Dreamingand the songs are based on a made up reality with inspiration from Miranda and Elektra’s lives mixed with the co-songwriter’s life and the producers’ life. An entity of both dream segments and real stuff with the awake and dreaming feeling to tie it all together. The album theme match well with the dreamy Say Lou Lou sound, but

when talking about sound the twins express a wish to experiment more.

– I think we found our sound really early on. But we’re both eager to experiment and try new stuff, Miranda says.

Do you know where that experimentation might lead you?
– It depends on whom we’ll be working with on the next album and how we’ll do it. But at the moment we feel we wanna go a bit more indie, maybe a bit more rock. Indie pop, rock. I don’t know, that’s just have we feel now!

When you write about love, the douche bag theme seems to be recurring! And I think it’s cool how you write about stuff that people, or at least I, can relate to. There are no grandiose love stories.
M: I don’t think we have any grandiose love songs!
E: We only write about sister love. And the only proper love song on the album is Peppermint and that’s sort of an homage to teenage love that ended so that’s kind of sad.
M: And Beloved, but that’s more of a fuck you-song.
E: It’s about love but it’s about someone who constantly wants to change you. And I think the song correspond more to our record company and men in society in general, and not one single man.

But Hard For a Man is about one single man?
E: Yes, we’re sort of patronizing this guy, saying “oh poor you, it’s so hard being a boy in society… not.” It’s a story about how so many men we’ve met, still to this day, when they’re 35 or 40, are being tormented by some woman from the past. And how they treat other women badly because they’re afraid to let anybody in. Then there are so many girls who think “I can change him”. That’s what’s the song is about, it’s quite cynical.

Hah well yeah, but I like the whole being emotional crippled theme. AlsoFool of Me has sort of the same theme, right?
M: Yeah, but that song is really about a douche bag.
E: And Better In the Dark is about sleeping with someone and then not being able to turn it in to a relationship because you can’t really get in to a normal every day life together, which also happens to everybody.
M: Nothing But a Heartbeat is about someone who drains you emotionally over and over again until you’re just empty… God!
E: Yeah God! This is actually the first time we’ve sat down and thought about it like this!

Well would you ever write about reciprocated love then?
M: We’ve tried! But it just sounds so silly!
E: Reciprocated love is beautiful and pleasant but it’s not interesting for someone else to listen to. If you write about someone who fucked you over, that for me is interesting.

Do you think this way of seeing it has anything to do with you being Swedish? 
M: Swedes are so depressing.
E: I do think it’s a European thing. Growing up in Australia, guys are so much less complicated. There were a lot of douche bags there but they just say what they think and that’s that.

Ok, last question. In Peppermint, you’re whispering in Swedish, which I think is so cute. Would you wanna try that out more?
E: We were inspired by Agnetha Fältskog and her song Wrap Your Arms Around Me and it’s all in English but then she goes “älska mig!” (“love me!”) in Swedish.

So will you do it again?
M: I don’t think we’ll do a lot of it, but it’s a fun thing to mix different languages, like Arcade Fire singing in both English and French.
E: We’ll see. I’m not gonna rule it out but we wont be singing complete songs in Swedish… It’s weird; we don’t sound like ourselves when we sing in Swedish.
Miranda: In the beginning we thought it just sounded to pretentious, so like Ingmar Bergman-esk, but then we we’re just like fuck it, only Swedes will understand this anyway.

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Say WHO who?

There has been much hype surrounding the Swedish-Australian sisters Elektra and Miranda Kibley, aka Say Lou Lou, since a single of theirs appeared on Soundcloud in 2012. Now the girls' debut album Lucid Dreaming has been finally released, but it has been worth the wait?

Many Say Lou Lou fans say they are going for an expression with sharp edges; more challenging and "edgy" if you will. Although they have a softer expression that oozes reverie and sweetness, they sing well, exhibiting a flair for fine lyricism and have equipped their debut with a mixture of catchy, uptempo songs and melancholy ballads. All of which are wrapped in delicious synths, but without much friction or surprises.

Both Wilder Than The Wind and Beloved are gorgeous pop tracks and Nothing But A Heartbeat is clever and dance-y. And the question is whether the twins have taken vocal and attitude training from old Lise Karlsnes videos before recording the Skylights. Lucid Dreaming is a delicious affair, but with a limited shelf life date the real question is whether or not in 2016, we will be wondering what became of their hype.