Dark yet vibrant, somber and cheeky, anti-nostalgic but haunted by the past, Lights’ A6 is an album of contradictions existing in perplexing harmony. What else could we expect, in 2025, from the self-described “happiest sad girl you’ll ever meet?” This is the album for everyone who is hurting but wants to dance about it, who is trapped in the hellscape but won’t let it stop them from having some fun.

Opening with the distraught and honest “DAMAGE” followed by the unrestrained fuck-it optimism of “ALIVE AGAIN” the album delivers its emotional thesis: I’m hurting, you’re hurting, but the music is good and the vibes are immaculate tonight. I say tonight because this is a nighttime album, the soundtrack to citylights spinning around you as you head from one club/bar/party to the next. New wave riffs scintillate through every track, a sonic backbone that plays best once the sun goes down. The pop catchiness that Lights fuses it with is the neon shining across the whole revelrous mess of it all.

“This might be the night that I die,” she sings, “and I don’t want to die alone / So come a little closer / I don’t even need to know your name.” The camaraderie’s not perfect—maybe not even ideal—and while it certainly doesn’t glamorize partying, it doesn’t cast it as an inherently poor coping mechanism, either.

The brilliance of Lights’ lyrics have always been in their cutting simplicity, and that’s on full display here. “I swear this isn’t me / This is the damage talkin’,” she chants in “DAMAGE,” inviting you to sing along with her to make your own damage feel a little more palatable. Then she slashes our hearts open with “You know I love you, dear / But I can’t even look in the mirror” in the unapologetically bleak “SURFACE TENSION”—a harrowing, raw, honest track of emotional devastation that feels like an existential panic attack playing out on the 3 a.m. bathroom floor.

While the present feels like something to endure, the return of a long-lost—and unmissed—former lover doesn’t make it much easier in “WHITE PAPER PALM TREES.” Its lyrical callback to her classic “February Air” reflects how the track merges the frosty glitter and sheen of The Listening, but mixed with A6’s darkness. In doing so, it evokes nostalgia for a younger time, but ultimately rejects it—mainly through the years of experience and refinement that Lights’ lyrics display between then and now. This defiance of nostalgia is refreshing, and adds to the album’s complexities: life may kinda suck right now, but the past wasn’t really all that great, either—so don’t glamorize it.

That’s not to say that the album isn’t fun, though. “DRINKS ON THE COAST” is, somehow, incredibly, tropical new wave. “CLINGY” is steamy. The closer, “DAY TWO,” is a pleasant callback to “Day One” off 2011’s Siberia—an ethereal shift into baptismal lyrics that resonate long after the album finishes, promising water for the soul on fire.

Partying through the pain, A6 dances in the cognitive dissonance of living through this time. It might also be the first entry in the recession-pop summer that’s on the way, and it’s definitely for everyone who felt themselves in Mon Mothma’s dance scene in Andor. Lights is telling us that it’s okay to sing through it, cry through it, hurt through it… just, get through it.

Image Credit: Amazon Music