Allie X Has Finally Let Happiness Catch Her

Allie X, the Toronto-born, LA-based singer, songwriter, producer, director, stylist, but mainly goth-pop iconoclast, has always treated pop like an art installation. After the chrome precision of “Girl With No Face”, her new album “Happiness Is Coming To Get You” feels… human. 

Self-produced and written mostly on piano, harpsichord, timpani, and strings frame her voice like a rococo portrait, but the edges flicker, detuned synths, drum machines that sound like they’re breathing their last breath. Built on a low-slung bassline, vintage breakbeats, and an infectious whistle, the upbeat, retro-futuristic pop track imagines an elevator ride through a dream-logic limbo, laced with the unease of Sartre existentialism. Allie describes the album as “a deep breath,” and you can hear it: lungs expanding, cracking a rib in the process.

There’s The Infant Marie, her new alter ego, her porcelain protagonist, half saint, half harbinger, gazing out from her glass cocoon on a desolate beach in her signature see-through box and in her signature look (read: hair-horned, snow-white, yellow-browed, white-lashed, orchestra-dressed). The new visuals continue her surreal, near-mythic language: the Happiness Is Going to Get You album cover shows her playing harp, again, she’s encased in her metal-and-glass cocoon, this time on a desolate beach, with behind her two looming dome structures. Her visual world is as considered as her sound, and Moni Haworth’s lens renders her in cool, cinematic tactility.

Of course, that universe has fashion orbiting tightly around it. Allie’s become something of a couture cryptid, haunting the front rows at PFW dressed in Charles Jeffrey or Ann Demeulemeester, sculpted in Iris Van Herpen, and rumoured to be in talks with Margiela for an upcoming collaboration. She’s also a drag-world darling and LGBTQ+ muse — her orbit includes Violet Chachki (Mistress Violet), Miss Fame, Aquaria, and Sasha Velour. A songwriter for BTS, Troye Sivan, and Marina & The Diamonds, Allie’s pop brain and queer heart are one and the same engine.