Allie X

Pop alchemist Allie X doesn’t believe in taking the easy road. Take her still-spinning 80s pastiche third record, 2024’s sinewy, dystopian tour-de-force Girl With No Face, a self-produced, solitary, almost-entirely synthetic endeavour. Made holed away at her computer for years—described as sitting in front of a mirror and staring at herself—Girl With No Face spurred near-complete ego-death and a maddening exaltation of her body, mind and society at large.

“Ever since I was a kid, I had this sense that if I wanted to do something special, to be a hero, I had to suffer,” explains Canada’s Alexandra Hughes, drawing connection between this harmful compulsion and the Law of Opposites, a multifaceted philosophy which posits that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—in summary, light cannot exist without dark. “I always go about things in a harder way than technically required because I have this deep-rooted (probably flawed) belief that the more effort that goes in, the greater the result. Girl With No Face was such a technical and emotional labour. It wiped me out. I thought it would be years before I was ready to attempt producing an album again.”

But during the guttural self-exorcism and manic production process of Girl With No Face, an emotional white noise thrummed in conjunction; a vacuum into which indistinct piano melodies trickled unpredictably. “Every so often, I was drawn away from my computer, toward the piano, ” she explains, “I was hearing these melodies and words that were totally out of place for Girl With No Face—barely intelligible. ” These error-ridden curiosities felt entirely contrary to the rage cast by Girl With No Face, “as if a different person was writing them”. Intermittently from 2021-2023, Hughes captured these fledgling specimens—sonically reflective, long- lost, entirely contrary to the rage cast by her third record—in iPhone voice memos, planning to return to them at some future date. “Last summer, between tours, I found myself creatively restless, ” Hughes recalls. “So I gave myself a challenge: to sift through this fragmented three-year archive of voice memos and try to turn them into actual songs. ”

This meant wholeheartedly returning to the piano—her songwriting origin point—for the first time in a decade. “I let my hands wander the octaves. It felt like coming home, but with new ears. I was taken aback at how smooth the process felt, ” she says. Quickly, voice memos morphed into detailed piano arrangements brimming with ornamented musicality. “I couldn't help myself. I started producing—drums, bass, synths, symphonic textures. It poured out. ” This new sound was vastly oppositional to the strained and deliberate process she’d grown accustomed to—it was an ease born of friction; psychic space cleared; the light to Girl With No Face’s dark. So began to form Hughes’ self-produced fourth record, Happiness Is Going to Get You.

Happiness Is Going to Get You is a patina-tinged whirlwind of infernal and liminal nostalgia. At its core, the piano, the record's compositional spine, spins like the metal cylinder of a music box. Its symphonic sound—

alive and rapturous—elaborates upon Hughes’ signature dark whimsy, refracted through personal myth and sonic archaeology. Slowly spiralling through time, Happiness Is Going To Get You is a ferrotype portrait of a woman in free-fall, revisiting tableaus of her life with wide, wet eyes. Its storytelling—carrying a stark sense of eerie calm—balances an inevitable truth: that, as certainly as pain, happiness is coming. It does not come when it is called; rather, when it is ready.

Across the dramaturgy of Happiness Is Going to Get You, Hughes accepts this uneasy marriage of torment and joy with solemn glee—mostly so on the record’s title track, wherein her andante piano performance crystallises all its unsettling tension: “There’s a raping in the beauty / You’re alive, there’s no escape / Happiness is gonna get you / Happiness will make you pay / Like a satellite in free-fall / Like a seizure on the floor / Happiness is gonna get you / Better let it in / Happiness is at the door. ” Meanwhile, opener ‘Is Anybody

Out There’, a Beatles-esque anthem, confesses the difficulty of joy amid cultural anxiety and quiet devastations, winding through recalled tea bags, the deep fear of losing her dog, LA wildfires and the passing of long-time collaborator Bram Inscore. Its wiry, hypnotic chorus delivers existential dread through a dense wall of harmonies and a stylish sampling of a 90s orchestral stab. It’s a signature move for X—forgoing subtlety for a slap in the face—that sets the tone for everything that follows.

Case-in-point: ‘Seventh Floor’ imagines an elevator ride in a dream-logic limbo—it’s an upbeat, off-kilter pop track built around a groovy bassline, vintage breakbeats and an infectious whistle motif, laced with rat-race existentialism and humming unease. sonic déjà vu wrapped in a smile. Later, ‘I Hope You Hear This Song’ takes a biting approach to modernity. It’s meta-pop with teeth: a track about haunting the listener. Hughes surveils the subject everywhere: the car, the café, the apartment next door. Its hook is light and bright—an earworm by design—but stalks mercilessly, contemplating legacy and longevity: “I’ll make you remember for the rest of your life. ” Other cuts meditate on self-embodiment (‘Reunite’), male emotional repression (‘Learn To Cry’) and naive positivity (‘Stay Green’); Hughes’ fourth is ultimately an ode to the complexity of human experience. Co-produced by Bastian Langebaek, Happiness Is Going to Get You largely cruises at a mid- tempo pace with the illusion of a live band dressed up in baroque flair: harpsichord, timpani, zither and strings colour the arrangements. Then, the usual warpy, pop-vortex suspects—detuned synths and retro drum machines—paint glam-pop filtered through a broken radio. Drenched in a chaotic sprawl of influences—Tori Amos, Paul McCartney, Air, Chaka Khan, Fiona Apple, Bach to name a few—it’s a sharp contrast to the tightly controlled world of its predecessor: remarkably unburdened, carried by a sense of resolve rarely heard in Hughes’ work.

This sense of newfound serenity doubly birthed the record’s heroic alter-ego: The Infant Marie—a bygone time-traveller encased in a Perspex cube, drifting through the 2020’s in the album artwork, delivering the record’s titular message. Marie contrasts the cold, digital world of the twenty-first century and a more tactile, ornamental one recalled from childhood; between programmed beats and wooden keys; between a curated persona and the raw, unfiltered self trying to survive, Marie mirrors the metaphysical theme at the core of the record—two truths can coexist at once. Backed by this fully-formed narrative, Happiness Is Going to Get You plays like a tragicomedy—poetic, exposed and oddly at peace with its own cosmic punchline. It’s best captured on the rapturous ‘It’s Just Light’ , wherein Hughes captures the disquieting clarity that comes with surrender: “The light / It shines through the glass / And it burns me with its rays. ” Hughes doesn’t fight it anymore. She lets it in.