Allie X isn’t someone you can predict. An artist who moves from chapter to chapter in her work, the Toronto pop savant reached intense new heights with her 2024 album ‘Girl With No Face’.
Rightly praised for its artistic daring, Allie X wasn’t about to stop there – she’s completed something new, something that moves between pop melody and classical composition, recalling the aesthetic daring of her adolescent idols.
Out now, ‘Happiness Is Going To Get You’ is self-described as a 12-track “deep breath”, and it’s a lush, easy-on-the-ear cycle, as beautiful as its predecessor was intense.
With Allie X supporting Magdalena Bay in February, ‘Happiness Is Going To Get You’ is a puzzle just waiting to be solved. Clash invited Allie X to explore the roots of her new album in our regular Foundations feature.
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Fiona Apple – ‘Tidal’
An amazing piano based record that I listened to when I was a kid. It still blows me away that she was 18 when she wrote it. And I’ll forever love her “everything is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMA’s, and the story behind her writing “criminal”. Musically – the chord progressions, the production techniques and the simplicity of just letting Fiona’s songwriting do all the talking is still really inspiring to this day.
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Portishead – ‘Dummy’
This album sent out ripples that shook culture and to this day it still sounds so incredibly fresh and innovative. It feels silly to analyse any of these albums too much but I love the warm crackle and the use of samples.
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Tori Amos – ‘Boys For Pele’
This was an album I got my grubby little hands on when I was really young. I think I told my mom to buy it for me at Blockbuster because I’d seen Tori on Much Music (Canadian MTV) and been fascinated by her. Imagine how naughty I felt when I opened the album artwork and saw pictures of her breastfeeding baby pigs haha!
I’m honestly so glad I stumbled upon this album, cause I didn’t listen to subversive material when I was a kid and I’m grateful that I at least had this one taste that hopefully fuelled my rebelliousness. I think Pele is a Goddess in Hawaii and the title is about feeding her men. There are some crazy lyrics on this album that feel like a stream of consciousness rage and rawness. “Chickens get a taste of your meat”. Tori’s use of harpsichord and her general prodigiousness as a player fascinates and floors me. Big big fan.
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The Beatles – ‘Abbey Road’
Hi – I’m a Beatles fan. I would rather not be as it seems to be subject matter for circle jerks of straight dudes who like to play complicated jazz voicings and graduated from Berklee… but alas, I’m a mega fan. Peter Jackson’s Get Back which was a reworking of the footage for the film Let It Be made me feel sympathetic to Paul McCartney and kind of made ‘Abbey Road’ one of my fave Beatles albums.
Watching them create those songs at this later stage when they’re all kind of tired and over it… Paul is always trying to move things forward and keep it going… I don’t know I just really related and it really moved me.
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Bach – Well Tempered Clavier
‘Happiness Is Going To Get You’ explores time as a concept. While writing it, I felt that I was channeling it from a different place in time. In many ways, it feels like I was a vessel for an energy coming from the future or perhaps the past. It marks the first Allie X “piano album” and even in that way alone it felt incredibly nostalgic as it brought back memories of my beginnings in writing and even the start of my musical journey which was as a piano student.
The Well Tempered Clavier is a very interesting work. I’ve learned that it was pivotal in changing to the standardized tuning of pianos we used today. I’ve learned that “equal temperament” (how modern pianos are tuned now) is only possible because all the semitones are slightly out of tune. True perfect tuning is mathematically impossible. The acceptance of imperfection feels pretty punk for a work that was created as a technical exercise…. Loves it. Thanks Bach!
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Björk – ‘Debut Live’
I kept returning to this live album of ‘Debut’, where Björk performs deconstructed versions of her electronic programming entirely acoustically with a huge amount of specialist musicians on niche and historical instruments. Her curiosity and experimentalism always feels so inspiring. With her incredible voice the essence of the song remains no matter how it is interpreted.
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‘Happiness Is Going To Get You’ is out now.
Photo Credit: Moni Haworth
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