Lael Neale
Lael Neale’s minimalist drone pop draws inspiration from the Transcendentalists, the alienation of modern life, and a rich array of musical influences—ranging from Dionne Warwick and John Lennon to primitive American gospel and Spacemen 3. Her expansive new record, Altogether Stranger, was written and recorded in the early morning quiet of Los Angeles. Clocking
Reflecting on her lo-fi, D.I.Y. ethos in her newsletter Consensual Sound, she writes:
“I love doing things the wrong way. It’s so rare that we get to do that in life. Even as artists, I notice a slow and steady conformity set in as musicians become legitimate. I do it too. How else would we fit into the font, size & waveform of streaming services. I rebel in minute ways—like refusing to follow a recipe. In the end, I’m just like everyone else: I want to belong.”
Altogether Stranger was conceived after three years of oscillating between rural solitude and urban chaos. Neale explains: “On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity.” The 32-minute album finds Neale perched at the piano in a hilltop bungalow, looking down on a rare curve of Sunset Blvd. Here, in this daily ritual of writing, singing, and painting—what David Lynch referred to as “the Art Life”—she creates the space for her most adventurous work to date.
The album’s centerpiece, “Tell Me How to Be Here,” paints a stark and haunting portrait of her return to Los Angeles, transmuting a dissociative unease into a woozy, dreamlike reverie, echoing the Velvet Underground with the distant chime of “Sunday Morning” bells. Neale’s crystalline voice floats above Blakeslee’s ambient tape loops and ghostly, disintegrating Mellotron, evoking the disorientation of waking up in a world that feels so ordinary it becomes strange.
Born and raised in Virginia’s idyllic countryside, Neale brought the high-lonesome sound of her home state with her when she moved to California to pursue music. After years of writing songs on guitar and playing small venues in Los Angeles, she discovered the Omnichord in 2019, which sparked a new creative direction. Working with Blakeslee, she recorded an unpolished collection of songs on a cassette 4-track, which Blakeslee sent to Sub Pop Records in March 2020. The resulting album, Acquainted With Night, struck a chord with listeners during the bizarre days of early 2021.
Star Eaters Delight (2023), deepened the collaboration with Blakeslee, infusing minimalist soundscapes with a heightened electric energy. The album’s subsequent tour included sold-out shows in Los Angeles, New York City, London, and Paris, multiple trips across Europe, and a West Coast run supporting kindred spirit Weyes Blood. This marked yet another return to Los Angeles.
Indeed, Los Angeles is not just the backdrop of Altogether Stranger but a lead character. The album’s accompanying film - created with Neale’s faithful Sony Handycam - builds on her ongoing series of self-directed music videos and tells the story of herself as an alien in a suit of mirrors stranded on Earth. Wandering through modern-day LA she finds both absurdity and beauty in our fragile, untenable way of life.
“In the course of writing this record there was one song I could never finish. The main line was, ‘I don’t belong here, I am an altogether stranger.’ I meant ‘stranger’ as a noun, not an adjective. Even though I abandoned the song, the lost chorus stuck with me & became the unspoken motif of the record,” says Neale. Over the long year it took to write Altogether Stranger, she vacillated between childlike optimism and existential melancholy. While she may not have been able to reconcile these opposing states, the attempt led to an ambitious breakthrough for this singular, self-sufficient artist.
