Lael Neale Delivers Lo-Fi Songs in Her Unique Style » PopMatters

Lael Neale delivers her near-apocalyptic songs with eloquence and sangfroid. If this record is Neale bidding adieu to Los Angeles, then it is an unforgettable farewell.

Altogether Stranger Lael Neale Sub Pop 2 May 2025

For the better part of the last 15 years, Virginian-born musician Lael Neale has resided in Los Angeles. Cue Altogether Stranger, Neale’s fourth album, where Los Angeles is the all-encompassing subject matter; it’s far from a sun-drenched homage to the City of Angels, but rather an antithetical dark satire on its consumer-driven culture, in which everything appears identical, disposable, and vacuous. In defiance, Altogether Stranger is a collection of lo-fi home recordings—or atavistic hymns.

Before Neale became the musician we now know her as, her first record, I’ll Be Your Man (2015), is, perhaps surprisingly, a folk record, where, believe it or not, she adopts a country twang. Six years later, the release of Neale’s second album, Acquainted With Night (2021), followed, her first with Sub Pop. It marked her reinvention as a drone-pop artist, primarily through her use of the Omnichord, now an unmistakable staple of her inimitable sound, somewhere between the synthpop duo Suicide and the Velvet Underground, with the 1960s girl groups thrown in for good measure. For the most part, Neale stripped away any affectation, delivering cut-glass vocals with aplomb over minimalist, electropop loops.

After spending the COVID-19 lockdown on her parents’ farm in Virginia, Neale returned to Los Angeles in January 2023, when the city began to wear on her. Over a year, in a house perched in the hills of Echo Park, Neale wrote every morning to the sound of sirens and helicopters, trash trucks and cars; it was grist to the mill for the dystopian vision portrayed on Altogether Stranger, where citizens who, lacking autonomy, are trapped in a purgatory-like state of rampant consumerism and mindless consumption.

Returning to Los Angeles hammered home the appeal of the country, thus birthing one of the central themes of Altogether Stranger: city versus country. However, dichotomies have long been fixtures in Neale’s work—in fact, the wavering between Virginia and LA first appeared in 2021’s “Every Star Shivers in the Dark”. “I’m torn between the town and country,” Neale yearningly, desperately, almost unwillingly, intones.

The opener, “Wild Waters”, expresses this conflict, backed by Neale’s unique aesthetic: a surf-rock, droning guitar and an Omnichord. Therefore, Altogether Stranger is not a grand departure but rather a continuation of Lael Neale’s two albums with Sub Pop. Yet, compared to the other records, the arrangements and textures on Altogether Stranger are fuller, adorned by sharp-edged vocals. Despite being recorded digitally, unlike the other two LPs, Altogether Stranger maintains a warmth that you come to expect from an analog production, not to mention the customary hiss and hums.

Altogether Stranger is her most conceptual album to date; it tells of the spiritual collapse of modern living through the prism of Los Angeles, which means everything is amplified. Although it is a spectacle, there is an alarming truth to LA: it is a harbinger of things to come on a global scale if we are not quick enough to rectify the issues. Or perhaps that ship has sailed, as expressed in the ambiguous “All Good Things Will Come To Pass”, a song that begins with God instructing man, bringing to mind the opening of Bob Dylan‘s “Highway 61 Revisited”, where God commands Abraham.

In any case, “All Good Things Will Come to Pass” showcases there has always been a social hierarchy, as well as how comfort has ripped the heart out of humanity, all of which can be ignored for the chomping rhythm, the nimble xylophone, the tambourine, and a Dick Dale-esque surf-rock solo.

The third track, “Down the Freeway”, could be Suicide mixed with Neu! with its eddying synths and an unremitting electropop beat. Lyrically, people are heading to the mall or the beach, while the narrator is stuck in traffic on a highway, a metaphor for the state of limbo —a key idea in Altogether Stranger. Unsurprisingly, the narrator wants to escape—disappear and reappear, or not all.

An important theme in Altogether Stranger is escapism. Further to this point, the stifling effects of modernity make the narrators feel alienated. That’s encapsulated in Lael Neale’s music videos, where you will find a futuristic, sequin-dressed alien who has seemingly crash-landed on Earth à la Ziggy Stardust.

The humanism in Altogether Stranger is in recognizing that we are all, to a certain extent, strangers and, thus, all the same. In “Down the Freeway”, Lael Neale sings, “I’m just like everyone else / I am one of us”, an idea she reiterates in the last track,” There From Here”, where she matter-of-factly sings, “With people just like me / Trying to get there from here.”

Like the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who believed humanity was suffering due to materialism, Neale espouses a similar view. While also highlighting how consumerism affects the environment. In the lullaby-like “Sleep Through the Long Night”, Neale sings, “I’m heavy as plastic / In the belly Atlantic.” The next track, “Come On”, is anthemic, featuring a massive melody complete with a screeching organ and infectious “la, la’s” reminiscent of the Marvelettes.

With gentle electric guitar strumming, echoing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”, “Tell Me How to Be Here” delineates the adverse effects of a data-driven culture. The deep-seated longing expressed in the song—a principal theme in Neale’s lyrics—is exacerbated by the digital age in which everything is codified and neatly packaged, pivoting around algorithms and performance metrics, resulting in blandness over personality, perfection over peculiarities.

You would be hard-pressed to realize how dark Altogether Stranger is, as Lael Neale deals with unwieldy existential themes with deftness and insouciance. However, near the end of the record, you are left with hope as in “All Is Never Lost”, which explicates that the light within man, when the world began, is still burning.

Taking place in an airport, the ballad “There From Here” is the summation of all her themes: materialism, longing, purgatory (a word that she uses in the song), and escapism, which transitions into the desire to fly, an idea she also expresses in 2023’s “Blue Vein “.

Lael Neale is a paradox: on the one hand, she is an environmentalist who is inspired by the Transcendentalism movement of the 19th century; on the other, she evokes the allure of the golden age of Hollywood glamour. Moreover, Neale is earthy and aloof, anachronistic and futuristic. While oscillating between these conflicting states, Neale delivers her near-apocalyptic songs with eloquence and sangfroid. If Altogether Stranger is Neale bidding adieu to Los Angeles, then it is an unforgettable farewell.