Lights
Location
Toronto, ON
Website
Bio
When electro-rock sensation Lights first hit the music scene in 2008, she was just a songwriter with a synth and a dream. Her name may have been pluralized but Lights Poxleitner was a one-woman show who played and programmed her own instruments and sang her own lyrics.
Lyrically, Siberia is light years from her last, which was written when the singer, who spent much of her childhood travelling to places like the Philippines and Jamaica with her missionary parents, had left the nest and landed in Toronto. “A lot of those songs came from a sad but hopeful place. I was alone and pondering a lot. I’m a lot more aware of the person I am now and each of these songs is about an experience I’ve gone through,” she says. “This record came from a very happy place.”
Siberia‘s beats skitter and thwack, the retro electronics fire like decomposing lasers and the analog synths dirty up her trademark pretty melodies, propelling Lights’ emotion-soaked but still-cute croon into her sprawling, imperfect new sound.
Call it anti-electro, dream-step or perhaps even grit-pop. Whatevs. Just rest assured that it’s the same bright Lights; she’s just built herself a bigger city.
This admirable self-reliance is rare in pop—in fact, Lights, signed a publishing deal at 16 and began writing songs for other artists—but after her 2008 self-titled debut EP (precocious enough to earn her a best new artist Juno) and gold-selling full-length follow-up The Listening, Lights was ready to open herself up to collaborations on her unexpectedly experimental album Siberia. And by choosing such leftfield collaborators as live electronic outfit Holy Fuck and rising rapper Shad, she also opened up her sound.
