A few years ago, in what feels like an eternity in the timeline of pop music, Kyla La Grange released a string of killer tracks (“Cut Your Teeth”, “The Knife”) that positioned her to be one of the freshest new voices in electronic music. Now, after releasing the single “Hummingbird” complete with 360-degree video in the summer, the English singer is back with a vibrant new jam that should deliver her right to the top of an always crowded alt-pop field.
Titled “Justify”, the song features a newfound urgency from La Grange, though it retains the pop smarts she first showed off on her 2014 sophomore LP Cut Your Teeth. Listen to it below and via Spotify.
“I don’t really like to stick to making the same kind of music for too long, I think because I get bored pretty quickly and feel restless if I’m not trying new things, or maybe it’s more just that I always feel different as time passes,” La Grange writes online, via the Line of Best Fit. “[After my 2011 debut] I had a period of calm and a lot of introspection and started listening to a bunch of Scandi pop records and that’s around the time when I wrote Cut Your Teeth, when I just wanted to reflect and look back on things. Then I got to a point where I was just stupidly happy and full of bright feelings so I started listening to all the pure unadulterated chart pop that I had loved when I was 12 and had kind of forgotten about, and still LOVE today.”
She continues: “For some reason I think I had thought when I was at uni and stuff that it was embarrassing to like pop music, I guess coz I wanted to seem really serious and deep (lol) so I just pretended I didn’t. But I deffo did, in a big way… And then we come to now, which I guess is a time when I’ve been really influenced by dance music through touring with Faithless the last couple of summers, and have just loved going out and dancing and seeing how DJs produce stuff in a way that’s different to pop — it’s just been a really interesting time.”
As been reported, “Justify” is among of a quartet of singles La Grange will release fairly quickly, eschewing any sort of traditional album format and just blasting us in the face with her brilliant bits of alternative pop singles.
From this first taste, the move seems justified.