Lulla is a Chinese Canadian illustrator, fashion designer, singer/songwriter and producer who currently splits her time between Toronto and NYC. As a musician, the Canadian-born artist is a classically trained pianist, who recently began to experiment with electronic music by blending dark synth pop, alternative pop and indie pop to build an immersive sonic world that’s intimate and otherworldly. Thematically, her self-produced and self-written work explores emotional turmoil, femininity and nostalgia through sci-fi and futurism.
Lullaverse is the Canadian artist’s ongoing sci-fi narrative music project in which each song functions as a standalone emotional world and as a chapter in a larger mythological universe. Her second single “Secret Garden” is a a brooding and atmospheric alt-pop song featuring reverb-soaked, skittering beats, bursts of twinkling keys. Lulla’s yearning vocal ethereally floats over a brooding production that sonically seems to channel early Beacon and others.
“The garden is not a place. It is a body. The heart is hidden inside it. The hidden shrine is a vault,” Lulla explain. “A place where everything real is kept, worshipped in private, never surfaced. Heaven would call it sin. The world would call it a waste. Does it matter? Whether the devotion is directed toward a warm body or something of higher meaning, the distinction is irrelevant. She disappeared beyond the atmosphere either way.
“You can hear ‘Secret Garden’ as a queer love story,” she continues. “You can hear it as an artist’s confession. Both readings are fully supported. Neither one is wrong, it is deliberate ambiguous.”
Directed by the artist, the accompanying video features the artist, dressed in white with ivy wrapped around her in a white studio, near a computer and microphone. At one point, we see a confused Lulla running towards a bathroom. For the artist, she’s inexplicably and dangerous drawn to music — at seemingly all costs.