lucy miró al mundo y notó que está girando

Just when you thought the kids had buried the Beatles for good, here’s AKRIILA with lucy miró al mundo y notó que está girando. The title of the rising Chilean star’s new album (“Lucy looked at the world and noticed it’s turning”) borrows lines from “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the first song AKRIILA learned to play on the piano. The Fab Four might seem like an unlikely reference point for a flame-haired 22-year-old whose berserk debut album was filled with robotic tags like “Hot gays listen to AKRIILA” and “Hot twinks listen to AKRIILA.” But the more you listen, the more it makes a weird kind of sense. AKRIILA makes omnivorous music, the byproduct of a peripatetic appetite and an inability or refusal to streamline her impulses. She doesn’t sound like the Beatles; she sounds like someone playing you her 10 favorite records at the same time, a charming mash of dog-eared pages and favorited tabs.

Akri’s Lucy is not Julian Lennon’s classmate Lucy, nor LSD, nor a love interest. It’s a protagonist learning to live alone in a grown-up, lovesick world—and also, separately, a snail. Snails are pathetic, precious things, locomoting calmly as chaos erupts around them. On the album cover, AKRIILA holds a snail named Lucy as light breaks in from every side. As lucy unfolds, the record moves from the bitter depths of heartbreak to something like acceptance, or the painful death that’s necessary for the light to eventually come back. On the trip-hoppy, dream-poppy second track, “moriría y moriría” (“I would die and die”), AKRIILA threatens to shoot herself if she can’t have her sweetheart. Fast forward to the languorous ache of closer “lucy,” where AKRIILA sees a snail that’s sure to die, and she gives up; she says the world has stopped turning. “Ya no sé por qué aún me esfuerzo,” (“I don’t know why I still try”), she sighs.

While the album is packed with these love-scarred lyrics and angsty entreaties, you wouldn’t know it from the production, which is mostly handled by longtime collaborators Heartgaze and Vinco. Where AKRIILA’s 2024 album epistolares turbocharged Nia Archives’ sensitive jungle for a neoperreo club night, lucy uses mad thuds and speedy rhythms sparingly, saving a “Think” break for a sick flash on “un <3 inestable.” The new sound is groovy guitars and drums that make being down bad sound like springtime bliss, like crying and smiling while watching the sunrise say hiii. AKRIILA cites the Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea as inspo; younger ears might hear digi-rockers like yeule or Her New Knife. This is “rock” in the slippery DAW-brained sense, where iPhone-recorded guitars are overlaid with pixelated whimpers and songs frequently short-circuit at the two-minute mark. It’s rock that sounds like a timeless, placeless composite of all the preceding phases: not indie, not punk, not grunge, but the flavors are all intact and the laptop is simulating grit and dimension.

It’s a zoomer’s choose-your-own-anxiety adventure: “abrázame”—the imperative “hold me”—is gentle yet stompy as Akri groans about how she can’t be with anyone but “you,” sounding like a scuzzy skate rat fried off chain-smoking. These beats are mostly delightful, like following a Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumb trail of erratic surprises. Look left, and “gemela” spins an ancient Boards of Canada sample into a soft-rock sigh of defeat as AKRIILA counts down the days until she can see her person again. Turn right, and Jane Remover swaggers in for a synth-bass bop on “suave.” That title—“smooth”—is how Heartgaze and Vinco navigate production. It’s a petting zoo of frail bleeps and hand-me-down acoustics, where carefully plucked samples from Patti Smith and Chilean rockers Los Prisioneros link arms with umru and underscores-y lasers.

A few tracks feel undercooked or overcluttered: “santiago de chile” warps between spoken-word acoustics, EDM, and cumbia seemingly at random; “migajas de amor…” is a dazed yet taut pastiche of Argentine legend Gustavo Cerati’s “Te Llevo Para Que Me Lleves” that mostly just calls attention to how much less ecstatic it sounds by comparison. AKRIILA’s copious Auto-Tune use starts to feel emotionally limiting and exhausted by the album’s end. The sexy-sad mope-bot mode, somewhere between Wisp and osno1, tickles the ears on “el mundo y yo” and the fogged-out “this room could be heaven,” but she gets lost in the pulsing beat on “suave.” There’s nothing like the epistolares highlight “carta a mi papá,” where the Auto-Tune fell away for an unvarnished address to her dad—the dad who also taught her to love the Beatles.

The highs outweigh these defects. lucy’s two best songs are two of the most sonically disparate: “thank you, music!,” a sweet drizzle of cybernetic clunks, is a mission statement about taking the world in your palm; “lucy” goes full nu-gaze, with fey gasps, sitar, and a feeble little snailly dreaminess. Past and future tumble together as guitars give way to a whizzing synth and AKRIILA’s voice breaks into shards; her sad final lines are straight from a song that came out 58 years ago, while the music sounds more lustful for life and excited than anywhere else. The basic idea of someone so glum they lose sight of their surroundings is pretty cliché, but it’s a solid call to arms for a young generation that loves to bedrot and wallow in solitude. Take after AKRIILA and the unassuming snail: Give the world a chance, get hurt, and keep on crawling.