Lucette Returns With Sad Girl Anthem 'Back in the Blue'

Canadian singer-songwriter Lucette returns with the March 21 release of Nice Girl From The Suburbs, an intimately personal six-song EP that expands the musical inclinations she first began exploring on her acclaimed 2019 release Deluxe Hotel Room.

These new songs find Lucette (aka Lauren Gillis) offering up deeper, more autobiographical songwriting, as she takes full control of her musical direction for the first time. Along with the announcement, Lucette shares “Back in the Blue” featuring Mariel Buckley, a pedal-steel-filled boot-stomper filtered through a shaggy, slacker-pop lens. 

Lucette has also announced a special performance in her hometown of Edmonton, Alberta next Friday, December 13 at Ritchie Hall. Find more information HERE. 

‘Back in the Blue’ grapples with accepting that perfection is overrated,” Lucette explains. “It sums up where I’m at, sometimes overindulging in things that are bad for you, letting that go, and really learning to not give a f. It’s about trying to improve, but accepting that sometimes life hands you bulls and it’s okay to live in that for a bit.” She continues, “And of course, it features the inimitable Mariel Buckley. Mariel is outspoken, bad ass, and making waves in the indie and Americana scenes. She self-describes her music as ‘soft-hearted songs for the underdog.’”

In the winter of 2021, Lucette was finally coming out on the other side of a mental health journey she had been on since her late teens, feeling great about the time she had taken to hone her craft and focus on the kind of music she felt compelled to make. But then just three months shy of her 30th birthday, she suffered a life-changing injury and her entire perspective suddenly changed. “It just interrupted everything,” she says. “I was in so much pain and stripped of my independence. I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t do anything, and I wasn’t working.” There she was, back in a familiar dark mood and the music she was making no longer fit. 

Enter producer Soren Hansen (New Politics, Elle King, Sam Palladio). The pair began writing together and Lucette found herself in a collaborative environment where she felt fully in control of her own sound for the first time in her career. Instead of writing songs rooted in fictional characters and stories, her deeply introspective lyrics reflected the more vulnerable state she was in. The resulting 6-song EP shows Lucette living in the complexity of being a person, illustrating the push and pull of “both recognizing that dark place and recognizing that I didn’t really help myself to get out of it.” Resisting sad girl stereotypes, she mixes self-pity with clever self-deprecation, though not without a touch of empathy. Nice Girl From the Suburbs brims with self-awareness and a sense of shared humanity, as the wry observer in Lucette turns her sharply intuitive eye onto herself. 

“I’m being real with myself. I don’t feel like a victim of anyone else’s stuff. I’m a victim to my own brain,” she says. “It’s recognizing that I am my own worst enemy, but also that I think it’s okay. It’s kind of human to be your own worst enemy.” 

A native of Alberta, Canada, Lucette initially captured attention when she released her 2014 Dave Cobb-produced debut Black is the Color, with NPR Music naming her a must-see act at AmericanaFest. Her 2019 follow-up Deluxe Hotel Room was produced by Grammy-winning artist Sturgill Simpson and garnered praise from Paste, NPR Music, Billboard and Rolling Stone, who called it “a bold expansion of Lucette’s melodic sensibilities with arrangements that avoid the rootsy cliches of Americana music.” On this latest offering, Lucette continues her journey of self-discovery as an artist, further expanding her sonic influence as she draws from ‘90s dream pop and alt rock. Nice Girl From The Suburbs is a lively, though cliche-resisting, nod to past eras of music with one eye fixed on the future, wholly present and relevant for current anxiety-inducing times.

Photo Credit: Sebestian Buzzalino