Lucy Liyou, the California-based ambient musician and sound artist, is back with new music. She’s turning her semi-autobiographical theatrical work Mister Cobra, which debuts at Performance Space New York on March 28, into a proper album; Mr Cobra is out April 17 via Orange Milk. Check out two new songs from the record, “Yoohoo (An Overture)” and “Babygirl,” below.
“For Mr Cobra, I wanted to give myself the agency to distort all truths to see what jumped out to me as truthful in a reactive, and sometimes illusionary or misleading, sense–in all of this faulty rawness,” explained Liyou. “I was really drawn to sounds and images that felt satisfyingly ‘false’–I was drawn to Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, my favorite drag queens in Los Angeles who magically bombed every Monday, Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment, Sunik Kim’s Potential, and so much more. I wanted frenzy that felt disembodying–so disembodying that this time of my life could conjure a laugh.”
Mr Cobra follows Liyou’s 2025 album Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, and was written, recorded, and produced by Liyou herself. She describes Mr Cobra as a revisionist retelling of a period in high school during which she “fell in love with a predator.” Over its 12-song tracklist, the album works through varying forms of shame, including anger, disappointment, and dark humor. “I want people to laugh at me and with me,” she said in a press release, “to make this moment in my life feel like a gross, important, and unimportant spectacle.”
Read Pitchfork’s review of Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name.
