Lillie West knows exactly what hell looks like. She can describe it with precision and gut-wrenching detail: the restlessness, the loss of identity, the cost of every good feeling. What she can’t quite name is heaven. On Heaven 2, her Sub Pop debut and fourth album as Lala Lala, the title promises paradise. Still, it delivers something more honest: ten tracks from someone rebuilding an identity she didn’t realize she was destroying.

West spent the years between I Want the Door to Open (2021) and this record in constant motion — off-grid living in Taos, a residency in an Icelandic town where the sun never rose in winter, stretches in London, and finally Los Angeles. Along the way, she released If I Were A Real Man I Would Be Able To Break The Neck Of A Suffering Bird (2024), an instrumental album under her real name. Creating an ambient record wasn’t so much a decision as a way to process her identity crisis. Heaven 2 keeps that textural ambition but adds the gut-wrenching writing back in – the work of an artist who returned to lyrics only when she had something worth saying.

Co-produced with Jay Som‘s Melina Duterte, who played nearly every instrument alongside West, the album’s synths are muscular and its electronic drums precise. But the pair’s real gift is knowing when to let a texture breathe and when to let it swallow the room whole. That instinct defines the record. On “Even Mountains Erode,” West delivers “There are symbols and signs, you’re missing your life / You’re under a threat, that you can’t feel yet” with a nonchalance that makes the words cut deeper. The delivery is flat. The production beneath it – snappy drums, shimmering synths, strings rising and falling- does the emotional work her voice deliberately refuses to carry. Duterte builds feeling into the architecture, so West doesn’t have to perform it.

Heaven 2 is West’s plea to get out. Out of her own patterns, her own story, of a cycle that has become much too familiar. “Tricks” asks what happens when you stop running. “Lucky people get to live long / Don’t know how to find it / Not one of my tricks.” It’s the sound of someone who used to know exactly who she was — a Chicago musician, part of a scene, on a label, with a role — and can’t locate that person anymore. This isn’t a cliché album about finding yourself. It’s about losing an identity you already had and not knowing how to rebuild.

The title track is the album’s peak. “Heaven is a moment / Hell is a life / I’m forever broken / Neck against the knife,” West called this song melodramatic, and it is, but earned melodrama, not performance. The vocals build slowly until the whole thing opens into a massive instrumental outro. The static churn of Duterte’s synthesizers, the dark rumblings underneath – it recalls the suffocating electronics of The Postal Service’s “This Place Is a Prison,” the one moment on Give Up where the synths stop being cute and poppy and start drowning you. Here, the production consumes the song. You come out the other side feeling like you’ve been held underwater.

Beneath that weight runs a search for solid ground. Dirt appears everywhere on this record – in the title of the closer, in “Car Anymore,” in “Anywave,” and in “This City” – and for an album made by someone who spent years in perpetual motion, it’s the thing she keeps reaching for and can’t hold. “Does This Go Faster?” builds the catchiest hook around the bleakest observation: “Nothing on earth is free / Even in ecstasy / Hell is the day after the party.” You want to shout the chorus. Then you hear what you’re screaming.

Heaven 2 isn’t without its weaker moments. The emotional weight can feel repetitive rather than cumulative, and a few songs blend into the album’s texture, leaving no distinct mark. But thematically, the record is airtight – a vivid portrait of someone learning to take the next step forward even when the destination remains unclear. At its core, it works because Duterte builds the sonic architecture that lets you feel what West won’t say. The synths, the electronic drums, the textures that shift from track to track serve as the album’s backing vocals, carrying emotional registers that West’s restrained delivery leaves open.

“Wyoming Dirt” closes the record with almost a reluctant acceptance. “I always leave a place / I always leave somebody in the dirt.” West names the pattern. That’s not the same as breaking it, but it’s a start. She ends the album in motion, because that’s who she is. But the music around her – Duterte’s synths settling into something warm and patient – suggests the destination might matter less than she thinks.

Pre-order Heave 2 by Lala Lala HERE