In Cate Le Bon’s music, home is sometimes remote, but it is never unreachable.
The music of Cate Le Bon, the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, has a rigorous, art-school weirdness that can be both entrancing and estranging. She will write a lovely melody, then thread it through patches of dissonance. She sometimes repeats a word or phrase until it sounds uncanny. Le Bon was born in Wales in 1983, and lived there until 2013, when she moved first to Los Angeles, and then, in 2021, to Joshua Tree, in the Mojave Desert.
The result, Le Bon’s sixth solo album, wades into bleak themes—loss, memory, legacy, the destruction of the planet. But the music often has an up-tempo eighties vibe, with whining, Eno-esque guitars in “Remembering Me,” lashings of synthesizer and saxophone, and a head-nodding danceability throughout.
The family was casually musical. Le Bon’s dad played the guitar and made mix tapes. Le Bon took piano lessons. Everybody sang. They also relished the Welsh language, which Le Bon grew up speaking, and which continues to inflect her sound. “It’s a strong part of my identity,” she said. “And musically some of my very favorite musicians are Welsh—John Cale, Gruff Rhys.”