Radical love despite all is the resonant message of the West London artist’s psychedelic, long-awaited debut album ‘Starface’ W hen NME meets Lava La Rue , it’s just over a week before the UK general election. Until now, the Tories will have presided over the country for half of the 26-year-old’s lifetime. Windrush scandals, diminishing government support for transgender people and the spectre of austerity are just some of the issues that have dictated much of their existence.
They’re conditions ripe to produce the next kitchen sink epic but, on their debut album, La Rue’s veered rather off-piste. “I am an alien,” they explain, “who’s just crash-landed in a rural British area, but I’m pretending to be a Boy Scout. Because what I’ve learned about humans is that they have scouts, so I’ll dress up as one of those to blend in.
I could just be on an adventure and ask loads of questions and no one will think it’s weird.” Lava La Rue on The Cover of NME. Credit: Jamie Waters for NME You heard that right.
That’s the concept for La Rue’s NME photoshoot the next day, which parallels the narrative for their long-awaited debut album ‘Starface’. After years of hard graft founding West London’s radical pop collective NiNE8, acting as a creative director for Wet Leg and releasing one of NME’ s best EPs of 2021, ‘Butter-Fly’ , La Rue is finally in a position to release their debut solo record through Dirty Hit: “I definitely wanted to push wh.