Lights
A6
Album · Pop · 2025
“I just want to feel alive again,” Valerie Poxleitner declares on her sixth album as Lights, providing a succinct mission statement for the do-or-die attitude and adrenalizing energy coursing through A6. It’s the genre-hopping singer’s most unified statement to date, as she hitches herself to a lineage of motorik electropop that connects the vintage ’80s vibe of New Order and modern-day indie descendents like The Drums to the arena-sized synth-pop of “Dancing in the Dark” and “Blinding Lights.” The propulsive productions are an appropriate musical complement to a collection of songs that are very much about leaving the past in the rearview and blazing out for new horizons, be it urgent live-for-the-moment anthems like “ALIVE AGAIN” and “THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR,” or discofied post-breakup dispatches like “WHITE PAPER PALM TREE.” But the album’s ceaseless momentum eventually simmers down into the closing ambient hymn “DAY TWO,” which projects Lights’ beaming voice onto a dramatic synthscape that’s vast enough to blanket the sky.