Alex Lahey (Solo)

“Living in a world that wasn’t made for you makes you pretty strong and adaptive, and you find the fun in it,” says Alex Lahey. “It also makes you realize how absurd everything is. With ‘The Answer Is Always Yes,’ I wanted to get weird because the world is weird, and it’s even weirder when you realize you don’t fit into it all the time.”

It’s no secret that the world wasn’t built with most people in mind. For those who exist on the fringe, you learn to pave your own way, foster your own community, and create your own joy. As a queer person, Lahey learned how to adapt to a world that wasn’t made for her, and her third album, The Answer Is Always Yes, examines how she finds comfort in the discomfort, whether it’s reveling in absurdity or turning towards exploration.

Lahey’s debut album I Love You Like a Brother and its 2019 follow-up The Best of Luck Club take their focus from the lens of relationships, but with The Answer Is Always Yes, Lahey analyzes her otherness through different lenses, from its isolating effect to the surrealism and humor it instills.

“Congratulations” is about the strange experience of having two exes get married separately in a short time span, “The Sky Is Melting” revels in the chaos of consuming too many weed gummies, and the title track jokes about the immortality complex of hybrid drivers. Lahey also delves into intense experiences on tracks like “Permanent,” which juxtaposes the accelerating gentrification of her native Melbourne with the regression she felt while living in her childhood home during the pandemic, or “They Wouldn’t Let Me In,” Lahey’s first song mining the depths of her queer teenage years.

“All these kids around me were kissing and dating and having those formative experiences and talking about them with each other, and I felt so on the fringe because I didn't fit into that,” Lahey says of the track. “When I was growing up, there was no exposure to queerness, or certainly queer joy, in media. When you can't see that, you don't really know what your life's gonna look like. And especially when you're a teenager, for me, I was like, ‘Am I ever gonna get laid?’”

Just as Lahey learned to reimagine the world around her, the music of The Answer Is Always Yes is also the product of reimagination. After making a name for herself with heartfelt, witty, and energizing indie rock songs, Lahey felt she had accrued tried and true songwriting tricks. Instead of resting on her laurels, Lahey took a risk by inviting other writers and producers into the early stages of her creative process for the first time. With touring on hold indefinitely, Lahey didn’t have a strict deadline to finish the album, which lent plenty of time for writing sessions with the likes of Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol) and others. The result is not only Lahey’s most collaborative album yet, but also the most dynamic and surprising.

allie is the mononymous creative moniker of allie cuva (she/her), a transfemme songwriter, performer,