L’Rain Closed a Four-Album Story by Looking Directly at Herself
Nine years and four albums later, Taja Cheek has said the story is finished.
Fata Morgana arrived on 14 August through Mexican Summer, thirty-nine and a half minutes recorded at Gary’s Electric Studio in Brooklyn, and it is explicitly the last part of a quadrilogy.
A Sequence Announced Only at the End
The framing is unusual because it is retrospective. The record has been described as the culmination of a quadrilogy that began with the 2017 debut, continued through Fatigue in 2021 and I Killed Your Dog in 2023.
Nobody was told this in 2017. A four-album sequence declared on the fourth album is a claim about what the work turned out to be, not a plan announced in advance and then executed.
Cheek’s own account supports that reading. She intended the record as “the last part of a continuum” and “a summation, an encapsulation of what had come before”.
Both phrases describe recognising a shape rather than completing a blueprint. “Continuum” in particular suggests something that was always continuous and has only now been given an end.
That is a more honest way to work than the alternative. An artist who announces a tetralogy on album one is committed to a structure before knowing whether the material will support it; naming it at the end means the sequence has to have actually happened.
Our piece on why alt-pop sits awkwardly in every genre system covers the classification problem a body of work like this presents.
The Same Subjects, Approached Differently
What the four records share is a set of recurring themes: the death of Cheek’s mother, romantic uncertainty, exhaustion, and the desire to create something meaningful amid the current state of the world.
The change on this album is one of angle rather than subject. On Fata Morgana, Cheek approaches these themes by looking directly at herself.
The word doing the work is “directly”. Three albums of oblique treatment followed by one direct one is a specific artistic decision, and it is usually the harder of the two.
Indirection is a genuine technique in music built on texture. It lets a difficult subject be present in a record without being stated, and it protects both the writer and the material from the flatness that plain statement can bring.
Choosing to abandon it on the closing record makes structural sense. A summation cannot be as evasive as the things it summarises, or there is nothing to sum.
The album also partly explores Cheek’s experiences as a modern-day American citizen, which broadens the frame from the personal without leaving it. Grief, exhaustion and the wish to make something that matters are not only private conditions.
The Same Three People, Every Time
Continuity is not only thematic. The record was conceived with longtime collaborators Ben Chapoteau-Katz and Andrew Lappin, who share the production credit with Cheek.
Three people producing a record together, across a body of work spanning nearly a decade, is the practical reason the four albums sound like one project. There is no outside producer arriving to interpret the material for a wider audience.
It also explains how a record this dense stays coherent. Music assembled from layers and fragments requires someone to hold the whole in mind, and a team that has done it three times already does not have to relearn the method.
Recording at Gary’s Electric Studio in Brooklyn keeps the work geographically consistent too. Cheek is a Brooklyn-based musician making Brooklyn records, and the studio choice is of a piece with the collaborator choice: use what you know.
Thirty-nine minutes and thirty seconds is a considered length for a summation. It is short enough to be heard in one sitting, which for a record meant to encapsulate three others is close to a requirement.
Universal Acclaim, Measured
The reception has been about as strong as aggregation allows. Metacritic recorded universal acclaim with a weighted average of 86 out of 100 from seven critic scores, and Any Decent Music has it at 8.0 out of 10 from eight.
AllMusic gave it four stars out of five, and Pitchfork awarded it Best New Music.
Two aggregators agreeing at that level, from small but overlapping samples, is a meaningful signal for a record this uncommercial. Experimental albums often produce wide spreads because reviewers disagree about the premise; near-unanimity suggests the premise landed.
Stephen Kearse’s Pitchfork review is worth quoting for what it identifies. Cheek, he wrote, is “more interested in mapping the crags of this strange elysium” than in seeking “escape” or finding “refuge”.
That is a precise distinction. Music about grief and exhaustion is usually organised around relief — the resolution, the release, the moment the weight lifts. Mapping instead of escaping means treating the condition as a place to be described rather than a problem to be solved.
Kearse concluded that the album “reaffirms the guiding impulse” of Cheek’s work, offering a “voyage” that only she “could helm”, and described it as “not jazz but open to the occasional blue note”.
That last phrase is the most useful thing anyone has said about where this music sits. It refuses the jazz label that Cheek’s instrumentation and harmonic vocabulary invite, while acknowledging what the label is picking up on.
Two Singles and a Title About Illusions
The campaign was compact. The album was announced on 10 June alongside the lead single “Soulless Cycle”, with “Borderline” following on 8 July, and the record itself arriving five weeks later.
Two singles across two months, then release. For an artist whose work does not reduce well to a single track, keeping the preview short is the sensible choice — extracting four songs from a record built as a continuous texture would misrepresent it.
The title is the other piece of framing. A fata morgana is a mirage: a real optical phenomenon that produces a convincing image of something that is not where it appears to be.
For a closing album about looking directly at oneself, naming it after an illusion is a deliberate complication. It suggests the direct look does not necessarily resolve anything — that what you see clearly may still not be reliably there.
It also sits well against the previous title. I Killed Your Dog was confrontational to the point of hostility; Fata Morgana is oblique and cool, which is a considerable shift in register for consecutive records.
Mexican Summer is the right label for the whole enterprise. The Brooklyn independent has built a catalogue on artists who work slowly across long arcs, which is the only environment in which a quadrilogy could be recognised after the fact rather than sold in advance.
The gaps between the records are part of that. Four albums across 2017, 2021, 2023 and 2026 is roughly one every two to three years, which is slow enough for each to be a distinct position rather than an instalment.
It also means the sequence covers a long stretch of one life. A body of work returning to a parent’s death across nine years is not repeating a subject; it is documenting how the same subject changes as the person carrying it does.
What happens next is genuinely open. An artist who has declared a body of work complete has removed the obvious template for a fifth album, which is presumably the point of declaring it.
Fata Morgana is out now on Mexican Summer.
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