AEG PRESENTS

ALEX LAHEY

+ Unflirt

Live at Oslo, Hackney

Tickets are on sale Friday at 10am from Alt Tickets.

“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.