Sally Shapiro’s latest LP, Ready To Live A Lie, the duo’s second since returning in 2022 from a six-year quasi-hiatus, marks a noticeable shift for the Swedish Italo outfit. While the album does retain their characteristic wistfulness and airy instrumentation and vocals, there is a markedly darker, punchier turn here. The forthright title is not teasing. The duo of Johan Agebjörn and the singer also known as Sally Shapiro still present us with dreamy qualities — they’re not selling nightmares yet — but there is an obvious edge that hadn’t previously infiltrated their art. The melancholy entertains resignation.
I suppose it should be of no surprise that our current season of human existence is polluting even our favorite Italo Disco-inspired group. Artists are alive, too, after all, and change as we all do. Disco Romance, their 2006 debut that secured a “best new music” tag and an 8.5 from the ever-cantankerous Pitchfork, and its beloved followups — 2009’s My Guilty Pleasure and 2013’s Somewhere Else — never shied away from the complicated dynamics of love and romance. However, those iterations of that discussion all seem so innocent now. Fast forward more than a decade and we’re all stuck in an era of corroded trust in each other and our institutions. The pain is more profound and more acute now.
In the online space, artificial intelligence of various designs is generating our words, filtering our faces and environments, and exposing us to the betrayal of malefactors. Our leaders’ motivations are increasingly suspect and we’re told to believe them over our own lying eyes. Is anything we’re seeing, reading, or hearing on social media real anymore? Who or what wrote the articles we’re perusing or the papers we’re grading? Can our romantic partners and close friends even trust their experience with us anymore?
Into this space we encounter Ready To Live A Lie. Let’s a take a look at some of the consistent record’s fantastic songs. Album opener “The Other Days” shows us that, like its Italians Do It Better-released predecessor, this IDIB-sourced album is going to have a tighter rhythm section than during the duo’s initial period. On this song, it serves to punctuate the ethereal vocals and dreamy, ambient synths with a tightly adhesive bass arp and drum machine. (Agebjörn’s ambient electronic collaborator Mikael Ögren contributed to the track and it shows.) “Days,” the big single off the album, is among my favorite Sally Shapiro cuts. The next song, “Hard To Love,” is a wall-thumping banger that is so entrancing that it’s easy to sing the title along with Shapiro repeatedly as a mantra less cynical than maybe it should be.
“Purple Colored Sky” is a minor-key strut of fluorescence dripping with trepidation. By the time Shapiro trades in her singing for talking, you’re hypnotized. It doesn’t matter if the lyrics are lamentations about a deteriorating relationship. Play the song again and get energized. “Did You Call Tonight,” a true highlight from the album, is as close to the Depeche Mode dungeon sonically as Sally Shapiro has ever been. Supporting Shapiro’s anxious inquiries, Agebjörn’s vocoded responses, and frequent Agebjörn collaborator Roger Gunnarsson’s falsetto are massive, staccato drums, a fat synth bass, and cinematic synths. By the time they hit the bridge, you’d be forgiven for expecting Dave Gahan to hop into the mix. “Oh Carrie” is another epic number, this time with a piano run that recalls classic Chicago house. It’s a can’t-miss cut.
Elsewhere on the record, Sally and Johan slow things down a bit. “He’s Not You” is a splash of melancholy with vocal hooks reminiscent of the duo’s classic numbers going back two decades. The sax-led, R&B number “Happier Somewhere Else” is a catchy, candlelit foray into uncertainty and despair. The piano-driven “Rain,” which closes the album, reflects Agebjörn’s more classic-sounding ambient releases and serves as a contemplative contrast to the album’s propulsive opener. It also might be the duo’s saddest song. There are Bon Iver levels of pain and regret. Even so, there is an underlying sense of hope to the song — the choral synth pads that swirl around Shapiro’s lead vox and Agebjörn’s fireplace-lit keys suggest the soul-shattering annihilation of an awful breakup will give way to some kind of resurrection. The music dissolves into a sample of rainfall, robust in its ablution.
It’s the perfect end to their darkest outing. They got down in the muck, but it doesn’t have to suffocate them.
Ready To Live A Lie is out now on your favorite digital platforms and on vinyl and CD.
