L’RAIN

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer and curator L’Rain (Taja Cheek) returns with her third album “I Killed Your Dog”. Echoing the themes of pain and identity that have characterized his previous work, “I Killed Your Dog” analyzes the act of hurting the people you love most. Multilayered in subject and form, L’Rain’s sonic explorations interrogate how multiplicity of emotions and experiences intersect with identity. The experimental and the hypercommercial; expectation and reality; hope and despair. “I’m imagining a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek explains. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying and strange.” Written amidst pain from the perspective of well-earned maturity, “I Killed Your Dog” takes the sonic world outlined by L’Rain on 2021’s “Fatigue” album onto a compelling new trajectory.

Described by Cheek as an “anti-breakup” record, I Killed Your Dog takes as its starting point the universal pop theme of love and analyzes it through the form of a conversation with a younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and with the formal musical conventions that others expect of her.

Along with longtime collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, Cheek developed L’Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the distinction between band and individual. Beginning as an abstract meditation on grief, Cheek traces L’Rain’s origins to the period following the dissolution of his vibrant DIY music community in early 2010s New York and the death of his mother, Lorraine. The name L’Rain was conceived both as a tribute to her mother and her gregarious alter ego L’ (lah-postrophe), and as a name she later tattooed on her arm.