Why Lights’ 'A6' Is Her Boldest Era Yet

Photo By: Trevor Brady

Lights has always had a gift for turning emotional chaos into synth-laced confessionals, but on her sixth studio album 'A6,' she doesn’t just open the door, she kicks it off the damn hinges.

Welcome to 'A6.' This isn’t a pop record made for background noise. It's for the spiraling, the healing, and the ones who feel too much and say too little. With glittering synths and moody guitar lines, Lights hands over her most intimate chapters yet. It's raw, unfiltered, and wired with self-awareness.

Tracks like “DAMAGE” hit like a panic attack on the dancefloor. It's cinematic, messy, and unforgettable. Then there’s “SURFACE TENSION,” pulling us into Berlin disco shadows with icy cool precision. Each song is a head trip: part therapy, part late-night drive.

And then there's “CLINGY," the pre-release standout, which is unhinged in the best way. Lights turns emotional dependency into a bop with teeth. “You could be the most confident person when that feeling creeps up,” she explains to BUZZMUSIC. That tug-of-war also plays out in the production, shifting from breezy guitar to smothering closeness. By the time you realize you’ve caught feelings, you're already deep.

But 'A6' isn’t just about losing control. “THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR” hits like a late-night voicemail to yourself, stripped, reflective, and just uncomfortable enough to feel like truth. Lights doesn’t want your pity. She wants you to look.

With four JUNOs and nearly half a billion streams, she could coast. Instead, she’s pulling us into her latest evolution, which demands your full attention. And she’s taking it on the road with the (A)LIVE AGAIN Tour coming to a city near you.

'A6' takes us on a rollercoaster of synth-fueled chaos and deep feels. When you first started cooking up this record, were you chasing a vibe, or did it just naturally spiral into this beautiful madness?

I initially set out to make a synth wave record. All of my A6 inspo playlists were heavily synthwave forward, but then it started to naturally lean more towards darkwave, and the pacing of the sonic inspiration really started shifting to something still melodic and feely but way more fast paced. I wrote Damage, Surface Tension and Alive Again and then knew I had to go back and shift some of the production in the previous songs to fit the new vibe. Drinks on the Coast, for example, was one that was originally way more synth wave and half-time, but I doubled-timed it and brought in a ton of guitar work.

"CLINGY" is that brutally honest anthem we didn’t know we needed. How did you manage to make obsession sound both hot and hilarious without making us feel totally called out?

I cackled reading this question! I had a summer where I found myself feeling clingy, and I’m not normally a jealous type of person. It caught me off guard, and I didn’t like how that felt, so I ended up working on myself a lot after that. But when I wrote this song, the first thing that came together was the chorus, and it was really intimate and heavy, and that is exactly how the feelings of clinginess and jealousy run through my mind, so I knew it had to go there. Facts are, no matter how confident you are, you’ll find moments of weakness, and you’ll learn so much from that!

You’ve always been a genre shapeshifter, but on 'A6,' you basically said, “rules? never heard of ’em.” What sounds or influences snuck in this time that might surprise even your ride-or-die fans?

A6 is equal parts old-Lights, new-Lights, dark wave, new wave, synthwave (all the waves), and Midwest emo. But the surprising influence might be some of the heavier bass sounds that I’ve perfected since really digging into my side project, LŪN. It’s much heavier and mainly instrumental, so my synth sound banks are filled with heavier sounds now, and I had a good time bringing a few of those into A6. 

"THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR" hits like an emotional sneak attack. How do you walk the line between spilling your guts and keeping a little mystery for yourself?

I think it’s really important to draw emotion from personal experience to inject into the music, but without making it about me. Art is meant to be absorbed and interpreted by the individual, I’m not going to make reference to very specific moments and people or places because that experience is only my own and therefore, not relatable. It’s a skill I have been honing for years, where I know exactly what that song is about, and it has shades of my pain or my experience, but still can be felt and interpreted the way the listener needs to hear it.

The (A)LIVE AGAIN Tour is already causing a frenzy. What’s one moment in the set where you just know the crowd’s gonna lose their minds?

My absolute favourite moment is when we play Alive Again. It has this “you only live once, so make the most of this moment” kind of energy, and we throw beach balls into the crowd, and it just really goes off. The chorus itself has no melody or rhyme; it’s just yelling, and I think everyone can easily participate in a moment like that!