L’Rain, AKA: multi-instrumentalist, composer and curator, Taja Cheek, has announced their new album, I Killed Your Dog, will arrive on October 13 via Mexican Summer. Over-writing themes of grief and identity that informed her previous work, the 16 new songs consider what it means to hurt the people you love the most. Described by Cheek as an “anti-break-up” record.

Following recent tours including with Animal Collective, Black Midi and LCD Soundsystem, L’Rain will embark on a 9-date North American fall tour. Headlining dates include a hometown performance at NYC’s Pioneer Works, and LA’s Zebulon, as well as an LA performance with Cate Le Bon and Mega Bog.

Where June’s standalone single “New Year’s UnResolution” was perhaps the most overtly pop-influenced song in the L’Rain oeuvre, today’s announcement is paired with new single “Pet Rock,” featuring tongue-in-cheek sonic references The Strokes and the “dad rock” bands Cheek never listened to in her youth. A sense of unease, frenzy and drama permeates the song – treading a line between irony and sincerity, Cheek first embodies and then dismantles the rock clichés she is confronted with. The playful, technicolor, miniatures-filled music video was directed by Studio Jojo (Josie Keefe and Jonny Campolo).

Cheek says of “Pet Rock,” “The song is based around an old story I’d been told about a woman who was riding the train but looked strange, and the reader eventually figures out that she’s dead, with glasses on, being propped up by the people that seem to have harmed her.
As a lifelong collector of tchotchkes, the music video is based on a concept I came up with featuring miniatures.”

Alongside long-time collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, Cheek has developed L’Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the distinction between band and individual. I Killed Your Dog is a crystallization of L’Rain’s tactile approach to song-writing. The album is also an implicit interrogation of the electric dreams and failures of early synthesizers, toying openly with rock music tropes, the lineage of folk as Black music in America, and Cheek’s own background playing in experimental guitar bands. Pieced together like snippets of found sound, L’Rain is edging towards a practice that resists disciplinary categorization and instead reflects the messiness of the self in all its fullness.

L’Rain
I Killed Your Dog
Tracklist
Mexican Summer

Sincerity Commercial
Our Funeral
Pet Rock
I Hate My Best Friends
I Killed Your Dog
All The Days You Remember
5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)
Sometimes
r(EMOTE)
Uncertainty Principle
Oh Wow, a Bird!
Knead Bee
Monsoon of Regret
Clumsy
What’s That Song?
New Year’s UnResolution

L’Rain 2023 Tour Dates

Oct 20 – Pioneer Works // New York, NY
Oct 25 – Johnny Brenda’s // Philadelphia, PA
Oct 26 – Songbyrd // Washington, DC
Nov 29 – El Rey // Los Angeles, CA *w/ Cate Le Bon and Mega Bog
Dec 1 – Zebulon // Los Angeles, CA
Dec 2 – Bottom of the Hill // San Francisco, CA
Dec 5 – Polaris Hall // Portland, OR
Dece 6- Madame Lou’s // Seattle, WA
Dec 7 – Fox Cabaret // Vancouver, BC

Pre-order I Killed Your Dog by L’Rain HERE