It is utterly exhausting keeping up an exterior smile when inside you feel the crippling, non-negotiable darkness of being lost in a deep cave. It’s confusing watching your identity evaporate, being seen by others in a way contrary to how you see yourself. It’s demoralizing being disoriented by society, the manipulative gaslighters in your life, and a depression that can’t be explained or shaken. The feelings are familiar.

For Lauren Ross, it took multiple breakdowns, lots of physical therapy, anti-depressants, and a move across the country before the clouds began to part, the music began to come, and La Louma emerged. On her debut, Let The World Be Flooded Out, she explores heavy subject matter in an upbeat atmosphere, merging her classical training with her DIY queer punk ethos. Recently, she released her debut album Let The World Be Flooded Out with the world. La Louma has also announced, her debut Los Angeles show on 11/30 at The Satellite with The Pack A.D. and Object as Subject. Let The World Be Flooded Out is out on Bitchwave, the feminist/queer collective and label she co-runs with Rituals of Mine’s Terra Lopez in Los Angeles.

La Louma on Let The World Be Flooded Out:

“I confronted a lot of things in my life on the path to making this album. I finally addressed my lifelong struggle with depression, retired from dating (promising myself, “I’m going to be the best girlfriend I’ve ever had”), moved across the country, and did a ton of physically and emotionally taxing physical therapy. Most importantly, I gave myself permission to be a musician again. Working in the music industry for the past decade without playing music, my peers saw me as strictly an industry person, completely unaware of my extensive musical past. That loss of personal identity and that loss of expression wore on me until I eventually had a nervous breakdown. Now, I express gratitude daily for the fact that I’m still here at all. And that I not only allowed myself to return to being a musician, but that I’ve gone beyond musicianship to allow myself to be an artist. It took nearly 3 years to make this album because I was starting from scratch. It was a slow, magical, deeply solitary process. Locking myself in my studio for hours and hours nearly every night, I patiently taught myself how to record, produce, engineer, and mix. I wrote and recorded about 200 lyric-based songs and instrumental pieces, eventually selecting 10 of them to comprise my first album, Let The World Be Flooded Out.”

La Louma

Track List:

1. The Decline of Nations
2. Tin Roof Now
3. If We Don’t Now We Never Will
4. Hear Me Out
5. Brother True
6. Just Wanna Love You
7. Candy
8. Aaj Mausam Bada Beimaan Hai
9. I Am Here I Am
10. Simple Things