Photo Credit: Super Bonjour x Mackenzie Walker for Louise Burns

Louise Burns announces new album, Element & shares single, “I Don’t Feel It Like I Used To”

Jenna Melanson·January 20, 2023

After sharing her debut single, “See You” – a stunning remake of the Depeche Mode classic – Louise Burns kicks off the new year with the announcement of her fifth full-length album, Element. Set for release on April 21 via Light Organ Records, the album is a plush and expansive tableau about holding your head high as you tunnel out of the emotional wreckage of life as we know it. Today, Burns also shares the record’s second single, “I Don’t Feel It Like I Used To.”

Burns has felt the weight of the past few years — how could she not? — but with Element, the acclaimed Vancouver producer-songwriter developed a sonic daydream to help offset unprecedented, terrifying global change. “For me, there is nothing more radical than being joyful despite what you’re going through,” she explains.

Though conceived as pop music for introverts, Element’s hooks are undeniably immediate. Contrasting the L.A.-based recording sessions of 2019’s Portraits, Burns pieced Element together over a two-and-a-half-year span between home and Mexico. Through its earliest writing sessions in the spring of 2020, Burns — a professional, traveling musician since the age of 15 — found herself grounded in British Columbia for the longest stretch of time since the early ‘00s, and she was experiencing anxiety and an artistic wanderlust because of it.

“I had never in my adult life stayed at home for that long, and I’m just talking the first three months of the pandemic. That was a really interesting feeling,” Burns reflects. “Just by default, I started writing music to create a sense of escapism for myself, choosing a more atmospheric and airier sonic aesthetic to create a sense of movement, despite being stuck in one place.”

Co-producing much of the record with Jason Corbett (ACTORS) at his Jacknife Studios in Vancouver, the sessions beginning with the elegant, Bryan Ferry-inspired remodeling of “See You” – Burns tracking synths with her dog, Ruby, at her feet. Elsewhere, Element builds off the ‘lax, but lush’ reverberations of Burns’ 2020 remix album, Silhouettes, through its backbone of electronics and sampled percussion. Inspired by the ocean breeze of her part-time residence in Baja Sur, Play Pretend weaves the soothing sound of literal humpback whales into its digitized snare hits. With opener, “I Don’t Feel Like I Used To,” she marries a southern gothic guitar twang with the incandescent hypnotism of trip-hop beatmaking.

Burns says of the latter:

“This is the first song I wrote for what became the album. I felt torn between writing something more gothic country like my older catalogue, or trip hop and sample based like the music I was listening to. Naturally it turned into both, which is a testament to the song’s story: an homage to my new found not really worrying about what people think my music, or me, might be, and focusing on what I like and what inspires me. Not feeling “it” like I used to is referring to the full body forward momentum I was feeling of getting over something that wasn’t good for me. Leaving behind your past, both physically and mentally, can be a glorious thing.”

Element’s other connections include guitar work from longtime collaborator Darcy Hancock, and soft-focus synth lines from nêhiyawak’s Matthew Cardinal on the title track, while vocologist Carol-Lynne Quinn co-plotted a series of R&B-inspired vocal runs with Burns. Kids, co-produced by ambient artist Colin Janz (Teset), marks a brave path forward for Burns as her first formal love song.

Change is an inevitability; the past few years have taught us that. While technically herself the whole way through, perhaps now more than ever before, Louise Burns finds herself fully in her element.