Name: XO Skeleton
Brand: La Force

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

SCR157LP

Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

140 Gram Vinyl

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2023-09-29

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0680341576015

Total Cap

Black LP

Artist

La Force

Genre GB

Alternative / Modern

Label GB

Secret City

Secret City Records is a Montreal-based independent record label and publishing company. With a label code of LC 30745, Secret City is dedicated to discovering and promoting talented artists from various genres. They provide a platform for musicians to showcase their unique sound and connect with music lovers around the world.
As an authoritative figure in the music industry, Secret City Records has built a reputation for releasing high-quality albums that resonate with listeners. Their diverse roster includes both established acts and emerging talents, ensuring a constant stream of fresh and innovative music.
With their commitment to supporting artists throughout their careers, Secret City Records offers comprehensive services such as artist development, marketing strategies, and distribution support. By fostering creativity and nurturing talent, they have become a trusted name in the independent music scene.

XO Skeleton is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&amp;B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “october,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”

The finality of death? The protection that another person’s love can or cannot bestow? These are body questions, matters of breath and flesh and pulse, which is the stuff at the centre of all of La Force’s music—beginning on her 2018 debut and also outward, into Engle’s electrifying work with Broken Social Scene, Big Red Machine, Efrim Menuck, Safia Nolin, and Aroara, her duo with her husband, Andrew Whiteman. La Force’s voice is stunning—somehow luscious and also wise—but so is her point of view—steady, sensitive, physical.

Engle made the album at home, in the house where she grew up, where she got married, where her father died—a place that’s “both completely dead and completely alive,” she says: a structure at the threshold of her inner and outer worlds. Off and on for two whole years, Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace. She’s been “unhealthily obsessed” with death, she says, since she was a child, and XO Skeleton is a kind of reckoning: a coming-to-terms with the oblivion that bookends a life, but also the “gooey centre” of love, loss, touch, and memory.

These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs. “october”, brings us right inside the protective cloak of kisses (or “XO Skeleton”) cast by love and memory; at the same time, it explores the spookiness of that space, the movement of invisible spirits, like a saxophone rippling through a hall of mirrors. Other tracks were informed by Engle’s participation in “Song A Day,” a Covid-era invitation-only songwriters’ circle, where La Force worked alongside musicians like Leslie Feist, Maggie Rogers, Beck, and Big Thief’s Buck Meek.

Throughout, XO Skeleton is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy. It bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—35 mournful minutes; but also searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.

 XO Skeleton

Music GB