Lava La Rue Talks Debut Album STARFACE, Sapphic Aliens, & Courtney Love
Photo Credit: Claryn Chong
On Lava La Rue’s debut album STARFACE, an alien crash lands on Earth with a mission to save humanity from itself — but they fall in love with a human girl and has to decide whether to complete their mission or stay on Earth forever in cosmic sapphic bliss.
That level of high concept storytelling is the whole point for Lava La Rue, a British-Jamaican artist from West London with a flair for mixed media. They are the co-founder and creative director for NiNE8 Collective, a London-based DIY art and music collective, and have gained a loyal following from their early EPs Butter-Fly (2021) and Hi-Fidelity (2022).
All their work has led to STARFACE, which tells a cosmic love story with elements of R&B, glam rock, K-pop, and more. Like STARFACE themself, La Rue refuses to be boxed in — whether it’s with sexuality, gender, or musical genres. Their debut album is, quite literally, only the beginning.
Ahead of the release, Teen Vogue caught up with La Rue over Zoom to chat about album preparations, storylines, creative influences, queerness, and everything to do with STARFACE.
Teen Vogue: I would love to know the process of creating Starface and how the idea first came to you.
Lava La Rue: I knew I wanted my first album to be conceptual. I've kind of been waiting my whole career to feel like I could finally drop an album. And I knew that when I wanted to do it, I wanted it to be larger than life, and have a storyline. The first single off the record “Push N Shuv,” I wrote that years and years and years ago before the pandemic, but I knew that I needed to wait until it was an album, so I could do it in the right way.
TV: Why now? Why have the album come out in 2024?
LVR: A budget. [Laughs] Finding a label and waiting to have the right team around me. It really was just like me and my manager and a DIY collective — you know, me just calling up friends and asking for favors, and I mean, it was great. But that was just a lot of ideas that I was gonna have to wait and work hard for. I wasn’t able to enter the music industry and instantly pick up the phone and be like, ‘Hey, can I have this big studio and do this here?’ I needed to work for it, really, and so it's taken me this amount of time to just have resources, man.
TV: What other albums or artists inspired you during the creation of STARFACE?
LLR: You'll be able to see huge Prince and Bowie references across [the album] — Lenny Kravitz, as well. Specifically on the aesthetic side, but I wanted to tie that into a very strong sense of Britishness. In the extraterrestrial and spacey world, I've really been inspired by ‘70s glam rock and post-punk new wave — specifically Talking Heads, there's a huge inspiration there. But when my character comes and crash-lands on Earth, it becomes very 2000s British sci-fi, like Doctor Who or something that you'd see playing on the BBC in 2007. So, it's a mixture of those two aesthetic worlds.
TV: What role does your queer identity play in the album and its storyline?
LLR: Well, it naturally shapes the storyline because if I talk about love, then it's going to naturally be through a queer perspective because that's my perspective. It being a queer record came secondary to me just trying to make a really good record for anyone who's listening. But yeah, I did want to have a narrative of like… let's make a song that feels like a Prince song but by a Gen Z lesbian. That was the objective, the agenda.
TV: Iconic, iconic! To me, STARFACE feels like hope. If you know tarot, it sort of reminds me of the Star tarot card where it comes after the Tower card — it's all destruction, and the star is the optimism and hope that comes afterwards. Does that ring true to your intentions with the album?
LLR: Yeah, for sure. You almost gave a better answer than I could, so how about when this gets written up you can say what you just said, but make it seem like I did? [Laughs]. But yeah, there's a storyline on this record. At the end, there's kind of an ultimate theme, something to take from it. The premise of the album is that my character Starface comes to the planet Earth to understand why human beings are so self-destructive, and in the process of that, my character ends up falling in love with the human girl — and lots of different things happen, but they end up becoming quite self-destructive themselves. In the end, there's a way where you can look at humanity and you can look at things like man, everything is f*cked and the world is in such a bad place — which it is — but you can look at it and be like, wow, everybody just wants to be loved. Every single human being just really deeply wants to be loved. I think my character sees that about humanity, and realizes self-destructiveness is more like a little child who's purposely falling down the stairs so that they can get some attention from their parents.
TV: The section with “LOVE BITES,” “CHANGE,” “Humanity,” “Second Hand Sadness,” and “Shell Of You” is such a stand out for me. Was this group of songs always sort of together and what part of the story do they tell?
LLR: Yeah, it kind of happens at a heartbreak point of the narrative, and so that's why they're next to each other. Sometimes, when you go through a heartbreak it can also paint your lens of how you're seeing the world as well — especially, if you were in a relationship where that person has become your everyday and it's what you’re used to. Then suddenly when that passes away, it's like, “Oh my God, who am I? What's been going on? What is my routine now? What was my original mission again?” Those songs being back to back is essentially going through a process.
TV: I'm curious about “CHANGES” in particular and the quote from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. What specifically inspired that track?
LLR: Yeah, so that quote is read by Courtney Love who I met backstage at a random event, and…
TV: That's crazy!
LLR: Yeah! Yeah, Courtney just had the best energy. Eventually, I was like you should be on my record and she was super down. That Glengarry quote that came from Courtney. Courtney was like, ‘I want to repurpose something.’ Because this song changes very much, like f*ck the man. Stick it to the Man as Jack Black says in School of Rock. Courtney was like I have this idea of taking something that's read or said by a man in a film and repurposing it to our perspective of what the song is.
It really is about maintaining that fire inside of you, to actually believe that there is a change. I think the people who profit off of oppression are counting on intelligent people to be like man, we’re so screwed — that there is no point to even boycott or protest, or even doing anything at all. So, it’s important to keep that fire that you have when you're a young person and you first hear about injustice. You get older and older and older, and you get whittled down. So, [it’s about] keeping that belief that the world can still change.
TV: And the final message of the album, “Celestial Destiny,” could you expand on what that means for you and what you hope the listener will take away from it?
LLR: The storyline ends on an ultimatum. Starface is falling in love with the human girl and on their mission to understand why humans are self-destructive. They've got the answer and they have two options: they can either report it back to the Mothership, and they'll be reassigned to a new mission, never to return to planet Earth. Or they don't report it, which means they won't save the planet Earth, and they'll just have to stay on Earth, madly in love with their partner, but watch the whole world crumble around them. It has a second meaning which is recognizing humans as these vulnerable little things that are also really destructive, and just doing the best that you can, and that's all that you can really do.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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