Lights: From Scene To Shining Scene

After years of experimentation, the iconic pop artist rediscovers the pure joy of making music on her own terms.

Published on March 3, 2025

by Ben Boddez

Photos by Trevor Brady | Design by Alex Kidd

Ever since breaking out of her metalcore beginnings to make her first major mark on the Canadian pop scene over a decade and a half ago, BC-based singer Lights has always been one to experiment with different sounds and mediums. Following up a slew of collabs in the electronic scene, her own bass-heavy LŪN side project, full-length reimaginings of her own albums – like a darker dEd version of her cheery PEP album – and even her own comic books, her latest fascination is actually German darkwave.

Lights does have German and Austrian ancestry, and still has family members and friends in Berlin. When the musical inspiration struck, she figured that the city was the perfect place to put the finishing touches on A6 – a project that simply stands for “Album Six.” Lights has always been inspired by the new-wave sounds of bands like The Cure, but she found there was something about combining them with the German language that aligned with her own sensibilities even more.

“With German lyrics, there’s sort of this efficiency and this non-emotion through the emotion that allows the song to show sadness while not showing sadness, which is a deeper version of what I’ve done kind of my whole career – wrapping a really sad lyric in happy clothes,” she says. “I put Berlin air recordings, audio recordings from night time, rain, and all these little secret ‘glue tracks,’ as I call them, throughout the whole record that just make it feel like being there.”

The location that Lights chooses to create in has always been very important to her – she’s never been one for a typical studio, especially if she’s meeting up with collaborators. Surrounding herself with natural beauty or her personal trinkets – she’s a big gamer and cosplayer, and was recently spotted at Vancouver’s Fan Expo – gives her more inspiration for letting her innermost emotions flow freely, instead of the more standard, clinical music-making spaces.

“I’ve just been enjoying the process of creating these creative little spaces that feel nice and that feel safe to pour your heart out in,” she says. “I’ve been able to access some really authentic, raw feelings and things I’ve been wanting to say through that experience that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to say in the way that I said them if I was with somebody else. We create these spaces for ourselves that are full of junk.”

Lights has explored quite a bit of the musical spectrum throughout her career, but lately, she feels like that kind of limitless expression has allowed her to get back in touch with some of her earliest musical beginnings. Part of that is being on her own label for the first time – “‘Damage’ is the first song I put out that I own!” she says proudly, also beaming about being able to actualize her “weirdest ideas” without anyone saying no. Without outside voices, she’s remembering a time when she created without criticism or analysis.

“Back on my first record, I was able to just write without knowing if it was good or not. And then I remember, once that first record came out, it was suddenly up for scrutiny,” she says. “I kind of got teased early on for doing ‘Dr. Seuss melodies’ and really simple lyrics, so I had a number of years where I was like, ‘How can I challenge the rhythms and the time signatures and all this stuff?’ ‘Damage’ is literally two chords. It’s just kind of nice to not overthink it and go, ‘I’m just gonna make the first melody that comes to mind.’”

Another catalyst behind Lights’ free-spirited attitude was the recent death of a loved one, a topic that comes up on a couple A6 tunes and a direct spark behind her taking a full-fledged leap into her bass music side project and masked LŪN character – inspired by the protagonist of her comic books. The idea of getting the most out of life that you possibly can appears on Lights’ other pre-release single, “Alive Again.”

“When they passed away, they had all these other plans and projects and things they worked on that never saw the light of day,” she says. “It clicked: why don’t we do all the things we love? The only person that’s holding us back is ourselves. I sat on the couch that week and started making my LŪN project. This is the life we have; it can be messy and you’re gonna make mistakes, and it may not always work, but this is all we got!”

The intro to A6 is all the affirmation Lights needed that pouring so much of herself into her musical output was the right decision. A brief sonic collage of recordings – including events like Lights emerging from a Berlin techno club at eight in the morning and cuddling with a kitten – it concludes with the voice of a taxi driver, who tells Lights, “Music is your gift.”

“I was recording it because we had the most insane conversation. One of my flights had been canceled and we had been moved to another airport, and he just started giving me this wisdom,” she says. “It really helped me process that music really is my purpose. Deconstructing through religion in my past forces you to let go of what you thought your purpose was initially. It really established the meaning of this whole record.”

The daughter of two Christian missionaries, that disconnection from her religious upbringing has been a theme in Lights’ music during her last couple projects. Perhaps her most interesting discussion of its effects yet, however, shows up on her aforementioned single, “Damage.” Centred by a hook of “I swear this isn’t me; this is the damage talking,” it examines the detrimental actions we take, which may have been pre-programmed into us – by parents, television, school, or anything else.

“We’re just constantly being bombarded by what we’re supposed to be, and at a certain point you’re like, ‘What even am I anymore? The world around me has created me.’ So how can I actually get down to the heart of what I am while still acknowledging that some of my responses were programmed?” she says. “Then we can approach it with this tongue-in-cheek humor and just go, ‘I do this because of this, but this is what I really feel.’ Being able to identify that takes time, patience and understanding.”

With all of Lights’ side projects and avenues for expression, there was a time where she might have told you that she never wanted to create an album that was “just” music again, feeling like it wasn’t as fulfilling as an interconnected multimedia adventure. Partially thanks to a cab driver, though, she’s once again re-aligned her priorities.

“You put your due diligence into your work, but at the end of the day, what sustains is the music, what lasts is the music,” she says. “And I’m really proud of the work that I created, but I think I have learned to balance what the real core of the art is. And to me, that is the music.”