Lucy Tun holds a mirror up to the collective face of her generation so closely they can see their breath on it. But the Burmese-British artist is interested in more than strategic angles, tricks of light and carefully crafted illusion – she’s searching for the real image. Her latest EP Unreal traces the blurred line where fantasy ends and reality begins; the mascara-smeared, screen-smashed collision between your curated world and the facts that fall short. And it’s there, that in-between space of drifting away with a daydream while being harshly tethered to earth, that you’ll find Lucy Tun – and every twenty-something who feels a pang of resonance in her music. For the first time since her artistic reincarnation from LCYTN to her complete name, a choice driven by maturity and a statement of commitment to her vision, Lucy is in soft-focus: no longer content to be the main character, Unreal sees her flip her camera lens to the world around her. Its seven tracks are a box of pop confections, each with its own distinct, floor-filling flavour – a distraction from a bitter aftertaste. Lucy’s instinct for this tension in her music was clear from the beginning with her self-released 2018 debut EP, Good Nights Bad Stories. Her love of Mitski melted into the Odd Future mixtapes borrowed from her older brother - and so her diaristic, indie-indebted lyrics became inseparable from her command of collar-grabbing 808s; difficult feelings were caught on a tide of electronic grooves. It’s a hybrid of sounds drawn from an entire internet’s worth of influences.
