Last Friday, the indie-pop trio LANY released their second full-length studio album, Malibu Nights. Only nine songs in total, the album spans a short thirty-three minutes. Frontman Paul Klein wrote Malibu Nights in a brief forty-five days.
Over the course of Malibu Nights, Klein obsessively ruminates on a past relationship, exploring the nuances of love, loss, and a deeply-felt heartbreak. Through his characteristically honest style of writing, he renders a poignantly truthful depiction of his experience, his voice emerging with more vulnerability than ever before.
On this record, the band retains their distinctive synth-pop sound, and yet they progress subtly in a new direction. And though the lyrical subject matter is generally somber, the music often feels the opposite: chill and upbeat.
The brevity of the album is deceptive—it is in fact the band’s most complex, nuanced project to date. Though dedicated LANY fans may have been hoping for something a bit lengthier, the conciseness of Malibu Nights is actually its greatest strength. Klein manages to convey a range of complex and sometimes contradictory emotions, like desperate urgency (“If You See Her”), burning frustration (“Run”), and bittersweet hopefulness (“Valentine’s Day”), all within a compact thirty-three minutes.
In the final song, titled “Malibu Nights,” Klein asks the question, “What do you do with a broken heart?” Any attentive listener will realize this lyric’s redundancy: at the close of an album like this, such a question is perplexingly ironic. The album is a pointedly obvious reaction to the end of an intense, all-encompassing relationship. Over the course of Malibu Nights, Klein spends nine songs coping with the aftermath of his broken heart. Perhaps unknowingly, in creating this album he has answered his own question, demonstrating exactly what you do with a broken heart: you write about it.