Mexican Summer & Anthology

L’Rain, the acclaimed musical project of multi-instrumentalist, composer and curator, Taja Cheek, returns with single “New Year’s UnResolution.” Perhaps the most overtly pop-influenced in the L’Rain oeuvre, it is a shimmering personal excavation of the end of a relationship. The song is produced alongside long-time collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz. “New Year’s UnResolution” marks L’Rain’s first new music since 2021’s Fatigue, which earned widespread Best Of The Year nods including #1 from The Wire, #2 from Pitchfork, New Yorker, Needle Drop, and many more.

Of “New Year’s UnResolution” Cheek says, “The words of this song were written at different periods of time to give a sense of what it’s like to think through the trajectory of a relationship at different points of my life–right after a break up, and many moons later. I wonder: what is it like to feel like you’ve forgotten a part of yourself?; how does time pass differently at different moments in your life? (like molasses, like water, like air); how do you set new terms of engagement with someone you’ve interacted with in a very specific way for a long time?; how do you deal with the turmoil of stepping into a distant unknown after a period of fierce intimacy?”

Through work with NYC institutions like Creative Time, the High Line and MoMA PS1, where she was a performance curator for several years, Cheek has explored the terms on which creative work is presented – extending a theme which resonates with her concerns as a musician. As she said in an interview with Pitchfork in 2021, “I’m hyper-aware of how marketing and packaging happens for Black people and women and Black women […] I like feeling a sense of agency in how those stories are told.” Cheek is now the performance curator of Luna Luna, the art carnival featuring the works of Basquiat, Dalí and Haring, recently purchased and revived by Drake. And this summer, Cheek will join BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! as the first-ever artist curator in the festival’s 45 years.