Lucy Liyou – MR COBRA

California-based artist Lucy Liyou releases her full-length album MR COBRA, on Orange Milk.

MR COBRA includes the previously singles “Yoohoo (An Overture)”, “Babygirl”, and “Crisis (Identity).”

Written, recorded, and produced by Liyou, MR COBRA combines free jazz, Korean folk opera, musique concrète, 2000s-era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance. Across its 12 tracks, Liyou enlists collaborators including Dustin Wong, Laura Cocks, Patrick Shiroishi, Andrew Weathers, and Jake Muir, pushing the work toward its most vibrant expressions.

The result is a lushly discordant work potent with rage, heartache, spite, longing, and dark humor—one that seeks to confront and dematerialize the boundaries of her transition while reconsidering her personhood as inevitably intertwined with public spectatorship. Liyou regards Mister Cobra as a humiliation ritual that raises questions about the role desire plays in one’s transition, how abuse can distort the motivations to transition, and where transitioning “begins” and “ends” (assuming that these points even exist).

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