Cate Le Bon didn’t approach her seventh album with a grand statement in mind. Instead, she found herself drawn to a single image: Colette Lumiere’s installation, ‘Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream’: a woman alone in a room draped with fabric and mirrors that catch the light. That sense of aftermath, the peculiar clarity that emerges once the dust has finally settled, seeps into every corner of Michelangelo Dying. Le Bon writes from within the fog of confusion, striving to capture that elusive moment when struggle gives way to something like rest.
Having spent most of her time producing for other artists, Le Bon hadn’t fully processed the breakup that was consuming her. When new music finally emerged, written in bursts between Cardiff, Hydra, London, and Los Angeles, she confronted love and heartbreak with unprecedented honesty. What began as a spikier follow-up to Pompeii was transformed entirely when her long-term relationship dissolved along with her desert dreams. Michelangelo Dying is what happens when emotional necessity elbows its way into the room, upending all your best-laid plans.
The resulting record explores what Le Bon calls “heartache railing against its own impermanence”: that cruel paradox of yearning for healing while resisting it, caught between the urge to move on and the temptation to hold on. These songs capture her negotiating the silent terms of loss, each track folding in on itself like the fabrics in Lumiere’s room: soft, strange, and impossible to flatten into a single meaning.
This could be Le Bon’s Disintegration moment: a career-defining meditation on things falling apart. Like Smith picking through the rubble of romance, she excavates her own emotional strata, sifting through layers to see what remains. The album moves like water, eschewing traditional song structures for shifts in colour and texture that feel more like weather patterns than pop forms. There’s that gossamer quality found in the best British introspection – the way Robert Wyatt made melancholy feel weightless on Rock Bottom, or how Vini Reilly could make a guitar seem to dissolve.
Production-wise, there are echoes of Avalon-era Roxy Music’s velvet textures, but filtered through a more intimate lens. Bowie’s ’80s guitar work is present too, not as a bold statement but as atmosphere; chords that linger in the air like smoke rather than cutting through it. The textures Le Bon has honed since Reward and Pompeii finally bloom here: guitars and saxophones warped into new shapes, vocals shimmering and dissipating like heat haze. Traces of Kate Bush’s theatrical bite, Nico’s chilly poise, and Laurie Anderson’s cybernetic warmth swirl together, yet never overshadow Cate Le Bon’s distinctive touch.
For all its abstraction, Le Bon sounds startlingly direct here. “I was trying to communicate with myself,” she told The Guardian – and it shows. On ‘Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?’ she asks, “Dig deep, are you dumb or devout?, skewering the line between faith and self-deception. On ‘About Time,’ when she sings, “I’m not lying in a bed you made,” then admits, “It’s the bed I’ve made, really, isn’t it?” you can hear her working through the logic of blame in real time.
The art-pop of Michelangelo Dying is wise enough to hold back when needed. Le Bon’s voice – cool and lightly processed – anchors the arrangement on ‘Mothers of Riches,’ while synths hum and drums tick. Following the breakup, illness crept in, and you can hear that ache haunting ‘Body As a River’, a song that confronts the peculiar shame women are taught to feel for wanting autonomy. Le Bon sings as if she’s both confessing and consoling herself, every note a small act of survival.
The album unfolds at its own unhurried pace. Initially, it can feel almost vaporous, but its textural richness rewards patience; with each listen, new layers emerge, like light shifting through water at different times of day. It marks a distinct shift from the absurdist energy that powered Crab Day or the more immediate pleasures of Reward: albums that could be spiky and playful even in their darker moments. There’s something to be said for missing that bite, the way Le Bon once sliced through melancholy with wit and unexpected angles. Still, this feels like necessary territory for her to explore.
The band operates like a constellation: Euan Hinshelwood’s saxophone swoops in when words falter; Paul Jones’ piano and Dylan Hadley’s percussion pulse gently in orbit; and Valentina Magaletti’s drums flicker like Morse code. It’s an intimacy forged over years, with each player attuned to the same frequency of restraint and release.
Le Bon’s parallel career as a producer is increasingly relevant here. With recent work for Dry Cleaning, Wilco, Horsegirl, Devendra Banhart, and St. Vincent’s Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, she’s become something of an Eno for our time, possessing that same intuitive grasp of atmosphere and an ability to guide artists toward their most essential selves. Artistic significance, the album suggests, is built through sustained vision rather than grand gestures.
John Cale’s appearance on ‘Ride’ feels fated, his restless spirit and fractured phrasing aligning with Le Bon’s own magnetic ambiguity. He once called her singing “awkward in the best way”– a voice where every crack lets the light shine through. This album isn’t about sweeping catharsis but learning to inhabit what’s left behind. By the final note, Le Bon hasn’t offered any resolution, but something more sustaining: the slow, luminous work of carrying on.
