L'Rain closes the quadrilogy by looking straight at herself

fata morgana is L'Rain's fourth album and the last of a quadrilogy that started with the self-titled record in 2017. It came out August 14 on Mexican Summer. Thirteen tracks, and the most directly Cheek has looked at herself.

Cheek grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in a house with her parents and grandparents. Her father worked in music promotion; her grandfather ran a neighborhood jazz club in the 1950s. The name L'Rain is for her mother, Lorraine C. Porter, who died before the debut came out. She studied ballet and modern dance at The Ailey School and learned piano, cello and Baroque recorder before picking up bass in high school, playing in Brooklyn bands that included Throw Vision. At Yale she went for music, dropped the major, and finished in American Studies in 2011. The debut landed in 2017 on Astro Nautico with Andrew Lappin co-producing, then Fatigue in 2021 and I Killed Your Dog in 2023, both on Mexican Summer and both ending up on year-end lists. She has worked with Vagabon, Helado Negro and Naama Tsabar, and performed with Kevin Beasley at the Whitney.

She built this one with the people who have shaped most of the catalog. Cheek, Ben Chapoteau-Katz and Lappin arranged and produced it; Lappin executive produced, engineered and mixed. Sessions ran through Gary's Electric in Brooklyn and Welterweight Sound in Marlboro, New York. Yuka Honda sequenced the album, and Joe LaPorta mastered at Sterling Sound. Cheek has called it the last part of a continuum, a summation of what came before, and the subjects are deliberate repeats: her mother, romantic uncertainty, exhaustion, and how to grow in a world that was not built for you to thrive in.

The record is a pile-up. Dancehall, slow jams, gospel, tape pieces and a guitar tone that could have come off a metal record, all inside the same frame. Her voice sits at the front of the mix on some songs and well behind it on others. Nothing holds still, and the sequencing knows it.

'rumors of light' opens and is gone in 37 seconds, more a door than a song. Then 'with time', 'blue' and 'july 5th' run long enough to build a body, and 'bedroom songs' is the first interruption of it. 'borderline', the second single, lands at track six, the middle of the record in every sense, and it carries the slow-jam side of the palette to the front. 'elmyra' and 'soulless cycle' sit right behind it, and they are the two the audience has already claimed, the first a fan favorite, the second the lead single and the most immediate thing here.

'glass ceiling' is the hinge into the last stretch, and 'i remember', 'birthday' and 'church of no one' close it out, the last of them given the most room to sit and the record's final argument. The mirages of belonging and alienation Cheek keeps circling belong to the record as a whole, not to any one song, which is exactly why the shape refuses to resolve. Where 'with time' and 'blue' let a groove establish itself, the back half keeps cutting away from whatever it just set up.

It is for people who keep Fatigue and I Killed Your Dog in rotation, and for anyone who came to this kind of R&B through the noise end rather than the smooth end. Play it loud and it is a band record. Play it on headphones and it is a set of rooms. If you want songs that arrive finished, this will read as evasion.

The cost is the fragments. The short pieces only work when they open something: 'rumors of light' hands straight into 'with time', and that earns its place. The others stand where songs should, 'no body / know body' and 'i remember' among them, and pull the run apart at the exact moment it is building. On a record this carefully sequenced, that is a real cost.

So 4.5. It is the strongest of the four, and the half point it gives up is right there, in the pieces that clear their throat where a song should start. Nine years in, Cheek still will not hand over the shape of the thing, and the closing stretch is the best case she has made for that.

The tracklist

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