Album Review: Alex Lahey - 'The Answer Is Always Yes'
Alex Lahey’s ‘The Answer Is Always Yes’ explores what it means to grow up in a world that isn’t made for you and how it shapes our perceptions of being human.
May 19th sees the release of Alex Lahey’s third album ‘The Answer Is Always Yes.’ Alex released her debut album ‘I Love You Like a Brother’ in 2017, and in 2019 followed it up with the album ‘The Best of Luck Club.’
‘Good Time’ opens the album and sets the tone of it very well. The track has the promise of becoming an anthem for being unapologetically yourself. Lahey’s ‘Good Time’ captures the internal struggles many of us often find ourselves experiencing for many different reasons and gives a voice to the thoughts we often have during these times where we just long for things to be better than they are.
“Living in a world that wasn’t made for you makes you pretty strong and adaptive, and you find the fun in it,” Alex Lahey says. “It also makes you realise how absurd everything is. With ‘The Answer Is Always Yes,’ I wanted to get weird because the world is weird, and it’s even weirder when you realise you don’t fit into it all the time.” It’s a realisation a lot of Lahey’s listeners may have come to about themselves and their own lives, ‘The Answer Is Always Yes’ feels like a comforting reassurance that you aren’t alone in that experience.
Lahey’s own experiences as a queer person and a daughter of migrants are reflected in her third album, ‘The Answer Is Always Yes’, along with exploring how she finds comfort in the discomfort while she navigates a world that wasn’t made for her.
‘Congratulations’ is about the strange experience of having two exes get married separately in a short time span. The track is one that tries to focus on being happy for the exes, while it inevitably unearths feelings Lahey buried and tried to move on from. It's often a difficult experience seeing our exes move on, especially if the split was one that was amicable, because we want to be happy for them, but our brains also use that moment to remind us that it could’ve been us had things gone differently and the relationship hadn’t run its course.
Next up is the song ‘Shit Talkin’’ and it captures the struggles of deciding which version of you people get to see, while also battling the anxiety of thinking people are talking about you behind your back. This track feels like the anthem for learning not to care about whether people are talking about you behind your back.
‘They Wouldn’t Let Me In’ has a distinct punk feeling to it, and it feels as though this would be an exciting track to experience in a live setting. This track reflects on Lahey’s experiences as a queer teenager. “All these kids around me were kissing and dating and having those formative experiences and talking about them with each other, and I felt so on the fringe because I didn’t fit into that,” Lahey says of the track. “When I was growing up, there was no exposure to queerness, or certainly queer joy, in media. And especially when you’re a teenager, for me, I was like, ‘Am I ever gonna get laid?’”
Alex Lahey brings her latest album to a close with the title track ‘The Answer Is Always Yes.’ The song’s synth-tinged stadium rock feeling brings the album to a close nicely, and really compliments the rest of the tracks on the album.
Alex explained that “I feel like if you’re saying yes and you’re exploring, you’re always moving,” she added that “that’s the part of life that I’m in right now. I just don’t wanna stop.” They’re motivating words and are encouraging ones to live by – they're full of hope that things can always improve and that there’s always room for us to grow from our experiences.
Words by Bethany Ellis
