Lucy Liyou – MR COBRA

Lucy Liyou returns to announce her new full-length album MR COBRA, the album version of her semi-autobiographical theatrical work Mister Cobra. The album combines free jazz, Korean folk opera, musique concrète, 2000s-era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance to confront and dematerialize the boundaries of her transition. MR COBRA is out April 17 via Orange Milk.

The solo theater-music performance of Mister Cobra debuts at Performance Space New York on March 28.

To introduce the project, Liyou shares the work’s opening two tracks. “Yoohoo (An Overture)” serves as a brief affective introduction: playful, silly, childishly and stupidly “seductive.”

“Babygirl” offers the narrative counterpart: you meet the main characters, “Babygirl” and “Mister Cobra,” and are drawn into the dynamic, circumstances, and stakes between them. Liyou speaks through “Babygirl,” whose relationship with the titular “Mister Cobra” unfolds across a heady cacophony of jazz and disco, symphony and pop, animal screeches and honeyed confessions.

Where her previous album Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name captured Liyou at her most direct—an earnest collection of ambient-pop songs praised by Pitchfork, Paste, The FADER, and more—MR COBRA is Liyou at her most mercurial and audacious. The work emerged from a desire for something more fictive than her typically diaristic practice.

“Sometimes trying to adhere to the ‘facts’ of my experiences made other emotional truths feel distorted. For MR COBRA, I wanted to give myself the agency to distort all truths to see what jumped out to me as truthful in a reactive, and sometimes illusionary or misleading, sense–in all of this faulty rawness,” she says. “I was really drawn to sounds and images that felt satisfyingly ‘false’–I was drawn to Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, my favorite drag queens in Los Angeles who magically bombed every Monday, Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment, Sunik Kim’s Potential, and so much more. I wanted frenzy that felt disembodying–so disembodying that this time of my life could conjure a laugh.”

Liyou describes the piece as “a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator. But I always thought of this as a record about shame.” That shame manifests in multiple forms: the refusal to recognize signs both ignored and not ignored, the pursuit of pinpointing when she “really realized” she was trans, and the contradictory feelings around it. “There was shame in thinking that trauma could make my transness legible,” she explains. “And shame in finding that legibility inaccurate and so satisfying at the same time.”

Yet despite its entanglements with shame, MR COBRA insists on holding space for dark humor as much as anger and deep disappointment. Liyou looks at the work as a humiliation ritual that raises questions about the role desire plays in one’s transition, how abuse can distort motivations to transition, and where transitioning “begins” and “ends.”

“I want people to laugh at me and with me,” she says, “to make this moment in my life feel like a gross, important, and unimportant spectacle.” A friend once told her: “You never fully become what you know you are. That thought-loop stops when you die. You stop transitioning when you die.” MR COBRA is Liyou searching anyway—not because these definitive points necessarily exist, but because the search itself affirms life. “This world wants women like me numb and dead. And so why not just laugh, moan, scratch, and implode? Why not make death wait its turn? I’m still busy. Super busy. I just have too much that I still want to ‘know.'”

Listen to “Yoohoo (An Overture)” and “Babygirl” and stay tuned for more from Lucy Liyou ahead of the full album release of MR COBRA on April 17 via Orange Milk.

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