As a master in the art of alchemy with regard to turning pain into an affecting song, even Lykke Li had to roll her eyes at herself for her latest album, Eyeye, being yet another rumination on and lamentation of heartbreak. Maybe that’s why she wanted to take a more meta approach with it. As her fifth record to date, it’s also her most compact and auditorily sparse. Limited to eight tracks that were recorded in her L.A. boudoir, Li employed the use of some high-quality psychedelics to take her back through her existence and pinpoint a moment that caused this vicious cycle of love-heartbreak-write-an-album-about-it. Because Li had to admit before going into the making of Eyeye, “Even for me, I felt, like, this is a joke. Like, are you for real? You’re gonna write another album about heartbreak? I can’t do this anymore.”
So it is that Eyeye is meant to “close a chapter” on what she sees in the present as tired motifs that she’s tread upon too often. Would that Taylor Swift might have a similar revelation—but then, she wouldn’t be Taylor Swift. And even with her veering toward “fictional songwriting” on folklore and evermore, it’s been made clear in the re-recording of her masters that the public is still very much enchanted with her—and so many other women’s—bread-and-butter topic: being slighted in love. Which begs the question: who is actually “sick” of this subject matter? The audience or the chanteuse?
Whatever the case may be, there’s no denying that the go-to reaction of any “dramatic” (read: feeling) person after a breakup is to get utterly soused—regardless of age. Hence a lyric on “Over” that goes, “Don’t wanna be sober/Now that it’s over/It’s over.” And that’s likely why the cover of Eyeye features a blurry and drowsy-looking Li, as glazed over as any woman tends to be after the end of a meaningful romance. Focusing on the demise of her relationship with Jeff Bhasker (though the two will always be linked by their son)—or Brad Pitt, depending on who you ask—Li collaborated once more with producer Björn Yttling (of Peter, Björn and John), who flew to the City of Angels as the pandemic and its various restrictions started to take hold in 2020. While tragic for many others, it provided Li with the perfect excuse to continue holing up in her Hollywood Hills abode, Norma Desmond-style. And, in the spirit of that kind of L.A. inspiration, Li was also watching Michael Mann’s 1995 classic, Heat, practically on repeat (no rhyme intended). It was the indelible visuals from this film that inspired her own video cycle from Eyeye, instantly recognizable for the fact that the sequences (recorded on 16-millimeter by cinematographer Eduard Grau) are on a loop reversed and played back for the duration of the song length. Li, in part, created them as a commentary on how people consume media anyway, unable to focus on much for very long. And one could easily envision these videos being played at a warehouse party on a projector with no one being the wiser to the fact that the same scene is on repeat.
One such video being “Highway to Your Heart” (a highway to hell, in the end). Playing into that meta sense of exploring love/heartbreak as concept art, Li wields the dramatic tableau of a car crash to exemplify the emotions of this form of loss. Naturally, she’s the girl being pulled from the wreckage by her erstwhile corazón. And as we watch the same scene of this man holding her in his arms before we pan out to see the full extent of the overturned car’s damage, we can feel everything about the parallel made more cinematic by the falling rain. Like most relationships, this vehicle was doomed to crash. Indeed, the motif of crashing is a pervasive trend in pop culture of the moment, from Charli XCX’s Crash to Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Perhaps because everyone has come to the revelation that nothing is built to last anymore, least of all “human connections.”
Those are as quaint as seedy, “in a pinch” hotel rooms like the one Li seems to be referencing in the album’s opener and lead single, “No Hotel.” Likening the loss of the person she loves (to “someone else”) to an addiction withdrawal, this is the song that sets the tone for the motif that runs throughout Eyeye. Which is, fundamentally, a riff on what Kesha said long ago: “Your love is my drug.” Without that drug to numb the pain of existence itself, what does life really add up to? In a defeated, warbling intonation, Li begins, “There’s no hotel, no cigarettes/And you’re still in love with someone else/And it’s cracking dawn, street soaking wet/And I’m on your doorstep, not losing yet.” Unless we’re talking about losing dignity. But there’s no such thing when you’re craving the love injection (no sexual innuendo meant) you were accustomed to getting. Even if that love has become more like methadone in its tepidity. It’s still something—the little “jolt of life”—one needs to function.
The sentiment of “with every step, I’m not over you” in “No Hotel” continues on “You Don’t Go Away.” A title that instantly addresses the simultaneous need for the love lost—again, like a drug dependency—as well as the desire to be rid of such feelings when knowing full well that they can only serve to compound one’s depression… even if the high of love can make a person feel great ephemerally. The comedown—heartbreak—never seems to be fully worth it. Granted, Li is not the sort of musician whose message is “don’t ever fall in love,” so much as “beware the fallout.” Because, as she puts it, “Doesn’t go away/Every night, I wait/Doesn’t go away/You don’t go away/And I know I hold on/To someone not here/But you won’t go away.” Being haunted by the specter of the person who once loved you but no longer does is enough to make her further demand of that love object, “Do you not feel?/I feel I can’t take it anymore/Do you not feel?/I feel so alone.”
To some extent, there is even a “joy” to the pain of being heartbroken. Or rather, one becomes so accustomed to the state that they might be of the belief that “Happy Hurts,” as track four is called. The halfway point of Eyeye, Li’s manic obsession has gotten no better, escalating to the stalking phase of post-breakup life, as made apparent by the video loop for the song. Evoking the feeling of being out of control and letting emotions overtake “rationality,” the sped-up look of the video is also reminiscent of what Madonna did long ago for “Ray of Light.” With the backdrop of Los Angeles at night as her companion, Li stalks her ex and the woman he’s with in her car, hence the lyric, “Look for you on every street/Drop down in my seat/Flying memories.” And while internet stalking has become a “socially acceptable” norm, this analog iteration indicates a more devoted, obsessive kind of obsession. Wanting to truly see it all unfold in real time as though to better increase one’s own pangs of agony through a kind of “tactility.” Singing, “Silver Chevy/Happy hurts/Never ready/Summer burns/Silver Chevy/Drive away/Back to her,” there are thematic tinges of the Nina Simone classic, “The Other Woman,” at play as well.
The other woman that Li’s ex seems to have waiting in the wings for whenever he wants to break up with Li next, knowing she’ll come when called on command. Only too eager to get that high again after her agonizing comedown. So it is that Li admits on “Carousel,” “It’s bad, but I run/Back in your arms/You never say the truth/So I stay.” Hoping, against her better judgment, that she’ll remain her love’s first choice, as opposed to someone “in the middle.” The title of the song itself alludes once more to Li’s cycle of self-destruction in love and art as she croons, “Spinning, I’m so strung out/Wire me, I can’t get down/Yeah, I’m high as hell/And I can’t let go/Oh, carousel.” The loop for this one also borrows the time-lapse method to show the naked figures of dancers Jessica Lee Keller and Spenser Theberge, doubling for Li and Jeff Wilbusch, as they perform the metaphorical “lovers’ dance” of pushing and pulling each other away, all in the frantic context of being within a spinning circle they can’t get out of. Directed once more by Theo Lindquist, the mesmerizing effect of watching this blurred-out, whirlwind dance truly is like seeing the toxicity of the kind of relationship described in Rihanna’s “We Found Love” video. One second unable to get enough of each other, and the next, knowing they need to let go for the sake of their respective health and well-being.
This much is also made evident in the visual accompaniment for “5D”—among the most gut-wrenching of the loops. Picking up where the love triangle theme of “Happy Hurts” left off, we see Li walk down the hall of an apartment building and into her own space (perhaps the apartment number is 5D, in addition to being a nod to the concept of 3D). In it, she sees her disintegrating lover packing up a bag to head out. She tries offering him a drink from her Solo cup, which he judgmentally rebuffs as he backs away from her like she’s contaminated. When the door shuts, Li chugs the contents of the cup and then throws it on the ground in anger, despising herself for having no control over anything—not herself or how the person she loves feels about her (or rather, doesn’t). To make matters worse, when she opens the door right after, she sees him chatting up another woman in the hall. She pretends to ignore it’s happening as she walks right past them and down the hallway again before the entire scene replays to renew our sense of horror and embarrassment for her.
The lyrics play up the meta-ness Li wants to get across in her bid to treat this latest heartbreak as an art piece, an exploration of her dynamic with the cycle of love-heartbreak-write-an-album-about-it, remarking with cinematic flair, “Is this the part I’m gonna play?/Where I stay and you run away?/Done one too many takes, no.” As for the chorus, “Is it only in the movie you love me in 5D?/Is it only in the movies?/On my screen?/In my dream?,” Li is referring to her use of psychedelics to create the record. Specifically, 5-MeO-DMT (along with other California “basics” that included ayahuasca and psilocybin).
Definitely beating out Lindsay Lohan’s song of the same name, Li’s subsequent track, “Over,” is a particular standout on the record as she freely admits her desire to descend into the bottom of a bottle as a coping mechanism (“I’m gonna let my feelings drown”). That said, the video loop for this offers the backdrop of a church where an AA meeting takes place. Unlike the other loops, this one starts from the end of the scene and reverses to the moment when Li is inside the church amid the circular (again with circles and cycles!) setup of chairs where one is meant to confess their addiction-related sins. But Li appears forced to be there, and would instead seem to prefer the delusions that a shot of whiskey can provide, including her insistence, “I don’t need you/I don’t want love.” But of course she does. It’s what everyone wants beneath all that rage and the self-built aura of impenetrability.
The grand denouement of Eyeye is “ü&I” (yes, Lady Gaga has a song called “Yoü and I”). And it is among the most ambitious for driving home the point about cycles and meta-ness as Li also employs the technique of reversing lyrics to highlight the very same palindrome effect of Eyeye as a title. Where Ace of Base once urged, “Don’t turn around,” Li instead demands, “Turn around.” Mainly because she can’t stand the idea of losing the one she loves, and refuses to acknowledge it, hence the frequent mention of closing her eyes in this song—as in: closing them to reality. The video for the finale takes us back to the car crash scene in “Highway to Your Heart.” But in this “vignette,” Li’s ex gives her the “kiss of life” that revives her as the rain continues to pour down. This providing an allegory to her lyrics, “Tears running down my eyes/Look, you made a grown woman cry/But I’m gonna love you like a miracle woman, so.”
We soon see she means it very literally when she says, “The movie is you and I” (this also being a notion Halsey uses in her recent video for “So Good”). For the camera reveals that this is a set and the makeup artists soon come out to do their touch-ups. With this “nothing is real” quality in mind, Li further declares, “I’m gonna close my eyes/Don’t wanna see your back walking/This can’t be the final line/Can’t take this heart breaking.” But yes, she can. For she’s managed to alchemize that breakage into something beautiful every time it happens. And if the album’s obsession with cycles wasn’t clear enough, the title being a palindrome and the runtime being one as well at thirty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds should convince listeners of her commitment. Yet if she’s determined to “break the cycle” of writing these types of songs, making such an amazing and unprecedented record about heartbreak probably wasn’t the way to do it. For it’s only going to leave her listeners wanting more. Plus, if Edith Piaf could continue to sing about the subject until her dying days, why can’t others as well?
Alas, Li seems to have shed all of her former ideas about love, the ones usually attributed to youth, when everything is “hyper-dramatic” (a.k.a. when people aren’t as accustomed to the repetition of being disappointed). As she stated herself, “The ideas I had about love, I was attaching them to a narrative that’s unattainable. It’s a simulation, almost like a movie, realizing that the ideas you had were wrong. I had to look myself in the eye and confront all those shadow parts of myself and dramatize it to move on.” But naturally, one can never really move on from the concept of love, with Li also admitting, “I think all art is about love in one way or the other, so of course it will always be there. But maybe just in a different shade.” Cue her child-inspired Ray of Light album.
