Michelangelo Dying
Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something,” without quite knowing what. *Michelangelo Dying* forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*, channeling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches,” “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
The Welsh musician composed her seventh album in the wake of fresh heartbreak. In songs that pair ornate arrangements and billowing melodies, she conjures mystery and surrenders to her own experience.
On Cate Le Bon’s seventh album, murky synthesizers and sweeping saxophones landscape her neo-psychedelic, modernist universe, and her voice gets closer to the listener than ever before.
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“It’s not comfortable, and it’s not particularly beautiful,” said Welsh art-pop veteran Cate Le Bon in 2019 about the chair she'd made by the release of
Michelangelo Dying by Cate Le Bon album review by Maria Richter for Northern Transmissions. The artist's LP drops on 9/26 via Mexican Summer