Big hair. Dark disco. The male gaze getting put in its place. Lelia is very much our sort of thing.
‘Hair’ is filthy, camp, sharp-edged post-disco, built on thick synth bass, jagged percussion and heavy guitars. The premise is beautifully simple: make your hair as enormous as possible, take up all the space, and refuse to shrink yourself for anybody.
Lelia puts it rather better:
“It’s about rejecting everything material. If I make my hair as big as possible then, in a nod to ‘Attack of the 50-Foot Woman’, I’ll destroy anything in my path in the quest to dance and be free.”
The video, directed by Imi Laurence, takes inspiration from feminist performance art and the 1970s women’s liberation movement, while flipping a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Instead of quietly submitting to the photographer’s abuse of power, Lelia rejects it completely and takes control of the frame herself. Much better.
‘Hair’ is taken from Lelia’s debut album Dark Disco, out 6 November via Peace Dragon Records. I can only apologise that this has taken so long to reach my desk because this is glorious. It makes me want to reach for my hairspray and high heels, and I genuinely cannot wait to hear more from her.
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