Maude Latour creates poetry in new album Sugar Water.
Latour’s first album Sugar Water displays a shift in her creative philosophy.
A year ago, Maude Latour was my least favorite artist. “Twin Flame” was stuck in my head for a week, and I couldn’t stand its repetitive, overly processed lines. I hated the entire Twin Flame EP, for that matter, except for “I Am Not the Sun.” The song felt like a poem, an invocation, and a progression that encapsulated a single moment and crystallized it. I even liked the refrain of “I am not the sun (oh my God, oh my God, you're everything I ever wanted).” Something felt added to its meaning each time. The other songs on Twin Flame had expressive phrases but were overly repetitive, and the lyrics between these phrases felt solely transitional. Latour stated in an interview during this era that she was inspired by artists who made songs “with an emphasis on the words always as opposed to on the poetry.” As a listener, I’ve described my taste in music so often as “songs that feel more like poems,” Latour’s songs completely opposed to this. Latour and I had different priorities. I simply didn’t want to hear funky chord structures and disjointed lyrics.
Something shifted, however, with Latour’s most recent project: the album Sugar Water. I was intrigued by a video of hers that popped up on my TikTok, where she explained that a Tolstoy fable inspired the title song. I loved the idea and decided to give her a second chance when the new album came out. I soon found myself drawn to every snippet she teased online. By the time “Whirlpool,” one of the leading singles, was released, I was hooked. From the onset, Sugar Water held that raw, magical quality that I loved in “I am Not the Sun.” This shift was best outlined by Latour herself in a more recent interview. When speaking about her writing process for the album Sugar Water, she stated “the sound is the final thing that it comes down to, but in its spirit, it’s just a poem.” This was just what I wanted.
Throughout Sugar Water, Latour grapples with the idea of what it means to enjoy life. A graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Philosophy, she plays with ideas from Tolstoy’s Confession. In his work, Tolstoy shares the eastern fable of a man who dangles from a tree above a well, caught between a wild beast waiting to attack him from above and a dragon with its mouth wide open waiting below. The man sees mice gnawing around the base of the branch and knows he is running out of time, yet he still reaches up to lick the drops of honey from the bush. In this, Tolstoy struggles with the purpose of living in the face of inevitable death. Latour captures this feeling in songs such as “7 (interlude),” where she writes:
No, I don’t wanna die
But I think we might
So I’ll just love you harder
Taste it all like sugar water
Sweet like sugar water
She decides to savor each precious moment, even as time flies by—her own conclusion to the problem Tolstoy raised. With this recurring theme comes greater cohesion and the philosophical poetry that Latour does best. The asides that would have irritated me before are an integral part of her music when grappling with ephemerality, such as one line in “Bloom”: “I don't know much about loving forever/But I am fascinated by it entirely.”
Latour takes her music to a new level conceptually, lyrically, and sonically with her new album. Her dedication to recording her life makes her such a strong artist and has allowed her to evolve in such a stunning way from words to poetry. While I don’t scroll back on Spotify to listen to the old Maude Latour, I’m so excited to see what she has coming next.
edited by Neha Modak.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.