I’ve had nights that felt like they belonged to a different version of me. Not the put-together one with the morning routine and not the wild 2am one either. The in-between version. The one who walks into a room and every person there can feel something is off about me in the best possible way. I don’t fit the vibe and I don’t try to. I went home with someone once who spent the whole night trying to figure me out, kept asking where I was from like the answer would help him understand why I felt like I was somewhere else even while I was right there with him. He never got it. LEXRAY gets it. ‘Interstellar’ is what plays in the head of the girl who’s been called too much and too hard to read her whole life and decided that’s a compliment.
It’s soft and weightless at first but then atmospheric synths pull you somewhere just slightly out of reach. Then the whole thing opens up into this driving euphoric rush that makes you want to move and feel things at the same time. Cinematic is the word and this shit sounds expensive.
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Being wanted by someone who can’t quite touch you is its own kind of high. They feel it, you feel it, and the gap between you is the whole damn thing. “I was born in the static of a midnight sky / A little bit human, a little too high” is a hell of an opening line. Gravity as a force that loved them but couldn’t contain them. The flickering in and out of frame. That’s the specific feeling of being present and completely untethered, and damn if I don’t know it from the inside.
Moving into the second verse is where it gets fucking good. “Got dust on my boots constellations in my veins / Speak human tongue but my thoughts are astral planes / They try to define me, binary forever / But I shapeshift baby / Call me interstellar.” The difference between explaining yourself and owning yourself. LEXRAY knows it cold. I read “shapeshift baby” and felt it somewhere specific.
Chorus is where it gets genuinely dirty. “If I was a dream / I would drift through your delta / If I was a wave / I would crash interstellar.” Drifting through someone’s delta is one of the more quietly erotic images I’ve heard in a pop song in a long time. Crashing through you. Past you. That distinction is the whole damn point.
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Hard close on the bridge. “I bend the light / I break the mold / A million lives / In one sole soul.” One soul, plural lives. Pop music rarely gets this close to what that actually feels like and the production swelling behind it is gorgeous as hell.
LEXRAY is a New York-based artist working at the intersection of electronic pop and high-fashion visual aesthetics. Their background is in beauty and visual artistry, which shows in the way they construct songs as complete sensory experiences. Drawing from futuristic pop, queer culture, and editorial worlds, LEXRAY makes music about transformation and identity, about existing outside the categories other people try to assign you. ‘Interstellar’ is their thesis statement.
That guy who spent the night trying to place me finally texted three weeks later asking if I wanted to hang out again. I didn’t respond. Some things don’t need an explanation. LEXRAY put it on a track called ‘Interstellar’ and that’s all the closure I needed.
