The partnership between Tokyo’s LLLL and Singapore-born, London-based (last time I checked) artist Yeule has been quite fruitful over the past year. The latter has appeared quite a bit on the prior’s Chains series, adding a sweetness to the often jittery and — sometimes — dark music. It’s a bit of a simplification, but Yeule has given LLLL’s recent music a pop core, an immediate element that adds tension to often shadowy music. “If You Say You Love Me Then Die With Me” finds the two going off in a much, much different direction. It appears on a collaborative album / art book bringing Zoom Lens together with Fakku, an English-language hentai publisher (!), and it is the most left-field number they’ve done yet. The tension is thicker than before — the beat open up like upside-down Pa’s Lam System, but transforms into this rumbling creature accented by cries that would sound welcome on a house track…except here, it sounds like it’s sinking towards the Earth’s core. Yeule adds a familiar humanity to the proceedings, but here she sounds equally off-kilter, moving in time with the beat and helping highlight its oddness, even while giving it a relateable core (building towards the titular request). Listen above.
