‘I Think Our Generation Is Having a Really Rough Time’: La Roux Explores the Millennial Ache on Her New Album
Categoria: Musica
The English artist's fourth album, Cabin Fever, is out today (Nov. 6). She talks about touring with Hilary Duff and what "In For the Kill" was really about.
Por Billboard | 06/11/2026
Elly Jackson has always built her musical project La Roux around a simple premise: resurfacing something from pop music. Her 2009 self-titled debut mined the ’80s, 2014’s Trouble in Paradise excavated late ’70s and early ’80s disco and 2020’s Supervision stayed in that world a bit longer. The first album shot her to global fame via its pair of hit singles “Bulletproof” — which spent 27 weeks at the Hot 100 and peaked at No. 8 — and “In For the Kill,” both era-defining songs whose success the English artist once found unmooring. She’s since come around. And now, with her new album Cabin Fever , she’s moved on to an era she and so many of us have been longing for — the late ’90s and early ’00s. “I went back to a time when I just remember pop music being something really fun,” she says, “which I guess maybe sometimes I feel like is missing from the pop landscape.” Influences like SWV, All Saints, Mariah Carey, Rodney Jerkins and peak Justin Timberlake are all embedded deep in the album, with an visual world to match this bygone era. Think the Gap, LL Bean, a cabin the woods of the Pacific Northwest and the warmth and safety you may feel when recalling life in the pre-internet era. It’s a very specific nostalgic frequency, and on Cabin Fever , La Roux hits it with precision. The album is also deeply personal — music about the end of a 17-year relationship, about addiction, the desire to finally grow up at age 38, and about a coming out Jackson never quite made clear to listeners the first time around. Speaking to Billboard while in Australia on tour opening for Hilary Duff, another artist with both a grip of era-defining bangers and a killer new album (and with whom La Roux has toured extensively this year), she talks about Cabin Fever , the nostalgia it’s mining and why she’s ready to talk about what her debut was really about. I saw in another interview that you called the aesthetic around this album akin to a Ralph Lauren ad. I see LL Bean, something very ’90s, very American. Very American. The whole album is not meant to feel British at all. The [music it’s referencing was born out of America — it wasn’t a British thing in any way. All Saints are probably the only remotely British reference on the record. One of the things that took time for me as a producer was making sure everything felt and sounded American. When I listen to it in L.A., it feels right. All the visual references are American Pacific Northwest and LL Bean, Gap, Ralph Lauren. That whole time when casual wear was king, that vintage male look where you could just wear a white t-shirt and jeans and it was iconic. La Roux has always been the opposite of that visually — slightly avant-garde, a little androgynous, artistic, alien aesthetics, suits and tailoring. I wanted to drop all of it. This is an area of style I also love, and it feels more true to me as a person now than anything else. A lot of peo