By Ng Su Ann
Infinity Field, the 22-minute record by singer-songwriter Lurkgurl, is sprawling, speaking to a convergence of crises—existential, ideological, spiritual—completely in step with her catalogue. It’s a meditation on all the themes she’s explored in the past decade’s steady stream of dreamy, hazy, lo-fi releases: life, death, love, loss, coming of age, faith, and the spiritual failings of late capitalism.
On opener “Holystream”, she awakens with a near-whisper, as if comforting a loved one: “you’re worthy of the way (home to Me) walk with ease”. Lurkgurl sounds calm and collected as ever on the third track “The News/Make Believe”, a buoyant, shimmering, uptempo tune that belies its subject matter: “their thirty reasons to bomb the middle east / every minute killing fifty thousand trees to suffer in the urban heat / guess i’ll stay inside and make believe.”
Though there is no doubt she is a singular wordsmith, Lurkgurl the artist comes across as a guarded character. We know of her only what she tells us in lyrics, between the lines, and what little we piece together from her Instagram posts, and she frequently revels “in the moments between / your awareness and sleep”. But death comes for us all eventually, and on album closer “Chain’s End”, we return right back to where we begin.
- Country: Malaysia
- Label: Self-released
- Year: 2021
