Lava La Rue on their ambitious sci-fi debut album, 'Starface' • Interview • DIY Magazine

No matter where Lava La Rue had grown up, you get the feeling that the 26-year-old creative polymath would never have turned out boring. But if the first key to inspiration is access, then from their earliest days they were drenched in it, soaking up the bustling multicultural sounds and scenes of West London, with their own diverse family background (a Black British mother, Latvian father and Jamaican grandmother) at home too. They recall playing gigs at community festivals in a punk band aged 11, and being snuck into squat parties and raves not long after. Before most people had taken their fake IDs to the local for a nervous first Malibu and Coke, Lava had already experienced a cultural smorgasbord.

“Now, being friends with people from the middle of nowhere, it makes me realise how much I grew up around loads of creative subcultures. But I wouldn’t say I took it for granted; I always wanted to get involved with stuff,” they begin, Zooming in from their bedroom where framed film posters cover a bright yellow wall. “I’d be annoyed when I was too young to go to stuff ‘cause that’s where all the cool cats were: gigging and doing vinyl sets and playing rocksteady and having independent pirate radio stations. There was just loads. Even now, if you walk down Portobello Road on a Saturday at 12pm, there’s Portobello Radio and people doing DJ sets out the shop fronts. It’s more than you could possibly need to be inspired as an artist.”

All this youthful exposure is likely one reason why their debut – the 17-track, high concept sonic odyssey of ‘Starface’ – does not sound in any way like the tentative first steps of a new artist finding their feet. It’s huge in scale in every way – from its pick’n’mix approach to influence, through its wide-ranging array of cross-cultural collaborations, to its entire double-layered narrative of a queer alien falling to earth (or, as they’ve previous called it, “a lesbian Ziggy Stardust”). Having first released as Lava back in 2018, they describe the interim years as “like going through puberty, finding your identity in public”. ‘Starface’, then, is about as clear an expression of the result as you’re likely to hear from a debuting artist this year.

But while Lava cuts a singular shape across the record and beyond, the importance of the network around them is evidently integral to everything they do too. If it began as a kid seeing the sheer breadth of inspiration the world had to offer, then it was cemented in college when they met the people that would go to form the prolific NiNE8 Collective alongside them. “The first day of college, I sat next to Biig Piig in class, and Mac Wetha was two seats down from us, and this year it’ll be 10 years since we first met,” they recall. NiNE8 has gone on to birth buzzy stars in the above trio and more; together they still regularly throw events and work on each other’s projects (‘Fluorescent / Beyond Space’ on Lava’s record features the group). The key, they suggest, is in the support network of equals they’ve built.

“If you look at NiNE8 as a collective, we’re all very different in terms of how we dress and our backgrounds, but we all get along because we’re friends on a values and personalities level as opposed to an aesthetics level,” Lava nods. “So because of that, it means we all make very different music which is cool. But also I actually think that when you have a group where everyone looks and dresses the same, there’s always one person who becomes the face of it. With NiNE8, we’re like The Avengers. Everyone has their own solo origin story, but when everyone comes together it’s really exciting.”

“The moral [of ‘Starface’] is that the tenderness we should have for each other is the answer to all of our problems.”

With Lava’s own origin story encompassing such vibrant and exploratory territories, it makes sense that ‘Starface’ arrives as their fantastical Avengers-style alter ego – albeit one sent to spread love rather than fight crime. “Lava is quite nerdy and someone who puts their head down, whereas Starface is this larger than life character,” they begin. “Growing up, those types of musicians were the ones I really got sucked into – the Princes, the Bowies.” A character and a plot that grew over several years of slowly piecing the record together, the aim was to create a technicolour narrative upon which to hang Lava’s own thoughts and experiences. A visual director as well as a musician, their film brain was working on the project in tandem. “It’s what every great writer or screenwriter does – you take something you went through and then apply it to the character so it can apply to everyone else,” they note.

Collaboration Nation

Across ‘Starface’, Lava enlists a globetrotting list of collaborators, from Audrey Nuna, Bb Sway and Yuné Pinku to their own NiNE8 Collective pals. They tell us more about the selections.

“I was just self-indulgent in that I listen to so much music from so many different countries and, just because I’m a British person making technically a British record, why should that stop me from getting a K-pop artist or a Chicano artist or a Korean-American artist? I love the scenes in all of these different pockets. My favourite thing to do on the internet is wake up and discover a whole new subculture in a city. Like OK, I wonder what the liquid drum n bass scene in Leeds is doing right now? What’s post-punk in south Edinburgh doing right now? You can just go online and see what they’re up to and what they did last weekend. I love it. So why not apply that to making a record too?”

We’ll handover to them to outline the plot: “It’s about an alien who comes to understand why humans are so self-destructive, and in the process of doing that they become a bit like that themselves through falling in love in a somewhat toxic relationship. The moral is that the tenderness we should have for each other is the answer to all of our problems. Starface comes to earth looking for this big convoluted answer to report back to the mothership, when actually it’s something much simpler, which is that we’re all just scared and everyone just wants to be loved. We all just have weird ways of trying to achieve that love – be it through respect or sex or money – but at the end of the day, people just want to feel accepted.” Dressed up in fantasy and fun it may be, but it’s a narrative that doesn’t take too much unpicking to transpose onto the modern, divided world – one where practising compassion and empathy feels like the most crucial act of all.

The video for recent single ‘Humanity’ finds Lava prefacing the track’s woozy tenderness with a clip of them addressing the crowd at a previous gig: “Be very sceptical of anyone who promotes the narrative that in order to care about the humanitarian rights of one group of people, that means you don’t care about another group of people. There are enough resources in this world for everyone to have basic human rights.” Meanwhile, when it came to stitching together the portraits of modern humanity that fill the rest of the video, they sent out the bat signal to their fan base: the Galactic Alliance of Extraterrestrial Space aliens – also known as the GAES.

“The whole concept of the GAES is something being accidentally gay. It’s the Galactic Alliance of Extraterrestrial Space aliens that just happens to be GAES – whoops!” they laugh. “That’s why a lot of the music is like that as well. ‘Love Bites’ is about being in a throuple situation where you’re the extra person, and it just so happens to be a really lesbian song – whoops! It’s a part of my identity and it’s the only way I would know how to write about romance.”

“The way Donald Glover will do a feature film, then dip into TV, then drop an amazing psychedelic Black rock album – that’s how I aspire to live my life.”

With much of Lava’s identity existing in the intersection of marginalised voices – a Black, queer, non-binary artist operating in a largely indie-alternative sphere – they approach everything with the same attitude as that of NiNE8: one that suggests we’ll get a lot further if we seek out the commonalities rather than focus too much on difference. “Being someone who is Black and queer, I see nights that are just exclusively for Black and queer people or just regular nights which are not diverse at all,” they say. “For me, I love having things that really feel like more of a bridge where it’s not like, ‘Here’s your space and here’s the space that’s normally there’. I want to open the conversation so it’s all mixed. That would be ideal.”

They point out that, while online conversations around access have doubtless come on leaps and bounds (in their own bubble at least), there’s still a long way to go to move those conversations IRL. “Some of the best places [in London] to find great bands in the alternative world are the Windmill or the George Tavern and these are venues that are right in multicultural hotspots. Brixton is such a multicultural Caribbean hotspot; where the George Tavern is is full of the South Asian community,” they point out. “But the moment you walk into those venues, you’re just surrounded by straight white people at an insane level. It doesn’t even make any sense because the areas that these spaces are in are so not that.”

‘Starface’ and its author, then, are on a mission both intergalactic and earthly to promote a more open-minded, open-hearted way of being – a boundaryless approach to life that extends to Lava La Rue as a multi-disciplinary umbrella project and beyond. Alongside the music, Lava has conceptualised and directed all the videos for ‘Starface’, embracing an aesthetic that’s part “‘70s / ‘80s psychedelic” and part “2000s 10th Doctor Who”; last year, meanwhile, they were the creative director for Wet Leg’s madcap, morris dancing BRITs performance – a new string to their bow that they’re keen to pursue.

“The person I reference is Donald Glover and the way he’ll do a feature film, then dip into TV, then drop an amazing psychedelic Black rock album, then be in a hip hop thing. He’s an all-rounder who likes to do it all but also has a quality level for everything they do where you can see the time and thought put into it,” they enthuse. “That’s the closest example of how I aspire to live my life.”

It’s a lofty aim but it’s also one that seems entirely plausible. Lava already has plans for an “immersive, larger than life” stage show for the ‘Starface’ tour, where gig-goers will be encouraged to cosplay as characters from the album. Following on from their inaugural day festival at Fabric, NiNE8 will be levelling up with an even bigger event at London’s The Cause later this year, while Lava notes that, when it comes to directing, unlike music it’s an older person’s game. “It’s a totally different world,” they nod. “Being young and new is like, you’re an idiot, you don’t know anyone. The older I get, the more respect I’ll get.”

As today’s chat rounds off, talk turns to the soundbite-driven culture of modern music making. Lava’s response might technically be towards that, but it also seems like an apt summary of their attitude as a whole: “I get it and I respect it, but I crave the opposite.”

‘Starface’ is out 19th July via Dirty Hit.

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