After years of crafting thoughtfully wandering compositions under the moniker L’Rain while simultaneously maneuvering around institutional art spaces as a curator, Taja Cheek earned a label she found to be a bit horrific: heady. To her, the music wasn’t that at all. “It’s in a weird time signature, but that’s just how my brain works,” she says with a laugh one humid afternoon in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I’m not like, Let me make this as complicated as I can so I can seem smarter.”
So she had a wild thought: What if she made a self-described “basic bitch” record about the vagaries of love that wasn’t so nice? “Sometimes when people talk about experimental music, it’s like it’s untouchable,” she says. “I wanted to do something that was the exact opposite of that.”
Cheek describes her upcoming third album, I Killed Your Dog, due out October 13, as “a bolder, brattier, more diabolical side of L’Rain,” in which she decidedly magnifies the complexities of severance and grief, be it with partners, family, or friends. Just as her 2017 self-titled debut and 2021’s Fatigue made lyrical montages out of music she wrote and composed at various ages, her latest work with collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz exists in a world without timestamps, merging the clarity of her recent years with the courage of her teenage self.
The album is grounded in a topic that’s both relatable and infinitely abstract—love—and boasts more immediate rock and folk influences. And Cheek shows off a playful streak on tracks like “Pet Rock,” which sounds like a skewed Strokes song and ends with a horror story about a bespectacled dead woman on a train. The record is still far from basic, with Cheek luxuriating in swirling soundscapes while grappling with ideas on femininity, boundaries, and expectations. “r(EMOTE)” is a rumination on past lovers consuming mental space, and “Uncertainty Principle” considers a familiar dating conundrum: Do I like you enough to try?
Lead single and album closer “New Year’s UnResolution,” a quiet explosion of synths and drums, features some of her earliest musings about how relationships collapse. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in love,” she sighs into the air on the song. It’s a clear-eyed reflection of the moments both immediately following a breakup and years after memories erode.
Though Cheek has left so much of her career up to gravity, drifting wherever the music takes her, she’s found herself becoming more decisive lately. “So much of what has happened to me has come organically, without me really thinking about what I want to do,” she realizes. “I feel like that’s starting to shift.”
L’Rain: I really love animals, especially dogs, and everywhere that we were recording, there was always a studio dog. I wanted the title to evoke a feeling, and I wanted that feeling to represent everything I was talking about on the record.
I mean, it’s horrible, it’s horrible. [laughs] But it also evokes so many things that I’m thinking about all at once. Like, is it empowerment? Is it like, you wronged me and I’m going to wrong you? Do I feel sorry about it? Do I not feel sorry about it? Am I evil? Am I not? Was it a mistake? We’ll see if people respond to it. Even if they don’t, I don’t want to be in a precious space as an artist.
I’ve always been influenced by rock music in a way. And if I’m being real, I’m also thinking about this moment where there’s a lot of rock music that—this is very antagonistic—kind of all sounds the same. And there’s a lot of loud white women in rock. [laughs] So it’s a real interest of mine, but it’s also tongue-in-cheek.
There’s this Blur song called “Song 2” that was meant to be a joke, and it ended up being a big hit. I was thinking a lot about that, and, I guess, trolling in a way, too. There is humor in things I do, and sometimes people pick up on it. But I know I’m laughing.
I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a guitar and just made a folk song, so that was trippy for me. Obviously, all American music comes from Black music, too. I don’t want to be confrontational, but I know a lot of Black women who play guitar, and I wish that they had more visibility on their music.
I spent a long time trying to keep the curation process and my music as separate as humanly possible, mostly because I didn’t want bosses to think I was not gonna do my work. [laughs] I also didn’t want people to think I was trying to use one side of myself to get ahead. Then they started mixing more by accident. But all musicians are really curators, maybe more so than in other disciplines. Because you have to find other people to play with. You have to make fliers, you have to find all the venues. You have to know who’s doing the booking and organize all of that. There’s so much curatorial labor that goes into it.
Audiences are so much more open to weird sounds than I would have thought they would be, and will follow me to places where I don’t expect them to be able to, which is really cool. We were starting our set with this recording of a bunch of dogs howling, and the crowd knew to howl with the recording. And I’m like, Wow, you guys are making yourselves vulnerable. That’s all I can hope for.
People also really want to open up to me about how my music played some role in really horrible things that happened to them, like accidents they’ve been in or epiphanies they’ve had while in a really tough situation or on a lot of drugs or intense life situations, which is a lot. I want to hold space for that as much as I can, but I want to receive it in a responsible way.
It’s exhausting being on stages all the time and hyper-visible, thinking about the ways I don’t fit into a specific ideal of beauty and how that may or may not affect my career and relationships. So on one level, writing about love is a way for me to disarm that. But it’s also something a lot of people have experienced and think about, so it’s a way for me to connect, I hope, to others.
I have a very tortured relationship with being in public for a lot of different reasons, much of it having to do with identity. And femininity is something that, as Black women, is denied in many ways. I’m just now realizing how that’s operated in my own life. Because there’s a difference between knowing something to be true and really understanding it. And looking back at how I chose to move through the world as a younger person, I was like, I don’t know if I love this.
Like, I didn’t wear nail polish at all until college, and I didn’t want to wear skirts. At the time, I was thinking about gender a lot and wanted to play around with that in a certain way. Now, when there’s so much conversation around gender and transness, it’s been helpful for me to see my own relationship to my own gender with more knowledge. At this point, I feel like maybe I wasn’t able to express myself as fully as I thought I was when I was younger, and I’m trying to figure out what that means for me now. I still don’t know.
I’m learning a lot from the younger me, actually. When I was younger, I was always reaching out to my older self, and now I’m like, “Wait a minute, I had something in those days.” I have admiration for not knowing what I didn’t know. I made so much music when I was younger that it’s still a well for me. I never threw out anything; I have pretty much everything I recorded since I was 15. Some of it is so silly and cheesy, but there are no bad ideas. It’s just a bad application.
When I was first starting out, posting fragments of songs on SoundCloud, that was because I was by myself and didn’t have anything else to do, so I had to figure out a way to channel everything. That’s part of the reason a lot of them aren’t traditional songs; I had to get stuff out really quickly. I write so much about the ends of things and grieving that a lot of those songs were started before the end, so the music is bridging the gap. The songs are my reflection in the moment. You wake up one day and you’re like, Oh, it’s past the end somehow. I’ve lived through the end.
