La Roux
Nabil
Elly Jackson has always built her musical project La Roux around a simple premise: resurfacing something from pop music. Her 2009 self-titled debut mined the ’80s, 2014’s Trouble in Paradise excavated late ’70s and early ’80s disco and 2020’s Supervision stayed in that world a bit longer. The first album shot her to global fame via its pair of hit singles “Bulletproof” — which spent 27 weeks at the Hot 100 and peaked at No. 8 — and “In For the Kill,” both era-defining songs whose success the English artist once found unmooring.
She’s since come around. And now, with her new album Cabin Fever, she’s moved on to an era she and so many of us have been longing for — the late ’90s and early ’00s. “I went back to a time when I just remember pop music being something really fun,” she says, “which I guess maybe sometimes I feel like is missing from the pop landscape.”
Influences like SWV, All Saints, Mariah Carey, Rodney Jerkins and peak Justin Timberlake are all embedded deep in the album, with an visual world to match this bygone era. Think the Gap, LL Bean, a cabin the woods of the Pacific Northwest and the warmth and safety you may feel when recalling life in the pre-internet era. It’s a very specific nostalgic frequency, and on Cabin Fever, La Roux hits it with precision.
The album is also deeply personal — music about the end of a 17-year relationship, about addiction, the desire to finally grow up at age 38, and about a coming out Jackson never quite made clear to listeners the first time around.
Speaking to Billboard while in Australia on tour opening for Hilary Duff, another artist with both a grip of era-defining bangers and a killer new album (and with whom La Roux has toured extensively this year), she talks about Cabin Fever, the nostalgia it’s mining and why she’s ready to talk about what her debut was really about.
I saw in another interview that you called the aesthetic around this album akin to a Ralph Lauren ad. I see LL Bean, something very ’90s, very American.
Very American. The whole album is not meant to feel British at all. The [music it’s referencing was born out of America — it wasn’t a British thing in any way. All Saints are probably the only remotely British reference on the record. One of the things that took time for me as a producer was making sure everything felt and sounded American. When I listen to it in L.A., it feels right. All the visual references are American Pacific Northwest and LL Bean, Gap, Ralph Lauren. That whole time when casual wear was king, that vintage male look where you could just wear a white t-shirt and jeans and it was iconic.
La Roux has always been the opposite of that visually — slightly avant-garde, a little androgynous, artistic, alien aesthetics, suits and tailoring. I wanted to drop all of it. This is an area of style I also love, and it feels more true to me as a person now than anything else.
A lot of people have so much longing for that era too — things seemed so simple then. There’s a comfort in the nostalgia, the millennial ache. You’re giving people that.
100%, and I’m really glad you touched on that, because it was actually part of the reason I did it. It goes back to a period of my childhood when I was about nine; it was one of the last times I think our generation, without exaggerating, felt safe. It was just before phones took over our lives. Social media started in 2009. I remember them telling me about Twitter at Universal in 2009, and me being like, “What the f–k? This sounds like the lamest thing ever. What do you mean icons I look up to and that I want to be mysterious are going to start writing things in 140 characters? That’s going to ruin pop culture.” And in my opinion, it has.
Everything from about 2000 on was just getting scarier and scarier, and just going back to that period where everything wasn’t so scary — I genuinely ache for it. I wanted to create something that made me feel like I could be back there, sonically, visually, everything. When I shot the trailer for this album, just getting the car on the right pine tree road with the right jacket and sitting in the tan interior — you can fake it. I really did feel like I was in a different time.
Having created this world, did you feel the comfort you were seeking?
Yeah, in flashes. But you only have to look out the window to realize you’ll never be able to go back. I think our generation is having a really rough time with the rise of AI, the climate, everything changing so quickly. Everyone wants it to stop, but no one’s stopping it. It’s like watching a burning building. Unfortunately, the effect it has on people, including me, is it makes you not want to engage. It makes you want to escape. So even this whole album is just an escape process.
I understand that it’s also about a breakup?
It’s about a breakup with myself and a breakup from a relationship in equal measure. The breakup with myself, as the album went on, became the more important and poignant part. But yes — I was in a 17-year relationship since I was about 20. My first album is actually about me falling in love with my best friend. “In for the Kill” maps that journey.
I never really spoke about that before, and this album has given me a weird confidence to talk about what that record was actually about, which I never wanted to admit at the time. I was trying to keep my private life really private. I was having a hard enough time with fame as it was. But I think it’s actually really important that people know what that album is about, because it became a big record for a lot of young gay people — it was a coming-out record for them, and I never admitted it was a coming-out record for me. There’s something to be lost in that. But yes, I was in that 17-year relationship, and it finally ended after many painful ups and downs in 2024.
You made an album that’s simultaneously about something really difficult and is also meant to be a refuge. How do you hold that juxtaposition?
You don’t get the light without the dark. There’s a lot of fantasy and delusion on this record, but there’s also a lot of genuine pain. “Falling” I wrote in the last few days of the mixing process — we were sequencing the album and I was like, “The beginning of this record is too full-on.” I hadn’t allowed myself a moment of sadness yet, because I’d been referencing R&B and trying to make everything slinky and sexy and fun. There’s a section — “Final Fantasy,” “Night Vision,” “Your Lover,” “I Just Keep Crying” — where I’m basically stuck in a fantasy, and it was outweighing the chance to be serious and sad. So I wrote “Falling” in a day, mixed it the next day, and it became a really important part of the record.
But I do think the reason “Babyline” and “Old Flames” feel so joyful at the end is because, whether you’ve been listening intently or not, you feel like you’ve had to get there. You’ve had to go through something to earn that payoff.
What do you mean when you say the album is also about breaking up with yourself?
There were so many parts of myself that were stopping me from maturing. I’m 38, and in my mind I’m like, 25. This job really allows for that kind of Peter Pan-ism — you can excuse it in this lifestyle a lot. I realized that I was aging, but my thought patterns were not those of somebody my age, and it was starting to really bother me. Something I’d previously been proud of — staying out of society, staying out of normal jobs, the normal process of getting married and having children — stopped becoming something I was proud of. I was like, “I’m actually missing out on some of the joys of adult life, and I can’t mature in my mind.”
What do you think was the cause?
I smoked a lot of weed, which I think really holds you back. You just stay in this haze. There are behaviors around being a stoner that you justify, and I was like, “What am I doing?” It keeps you stuck in a dream world. I’m a Pisces anyway, and I used to daydream constantly, stay in worlds that had no business being in, and I don’t think it was healthy. It didn’t help me in my relationship. There was real shame there, and I wanted to grow up, sort my head out and let go of a lot of those behaviors and thought patterns.
Can you point to particular songs on the album that are about that breakup with yourself?
“Cabin Fever” is just me having every single racing thought under the sun — worrying whether I can come back again, whether anyone’s going to give a f–k, whether I’ve ruined my career, whether I’m capable. So many questions, which is why the song is thought after thought that doesn’t really make sense. That’s very intentional. It’s also why the music video is just me staring into space — you look like you’re thinking, but really, you’re going slightly insane.
That’s why the record starts with “Cabin Fever” — it’s the start of the process of addressing all these thoughts. Then “Lose Myself” is about my relationship with weed and walking away from that addiction. “Your Lover” is about not really being able to sit in my relationship — we had lots of breaks, and I’d only ever been with one person, and there was a lot of unexercised desire locked up in my system. “Night Vision” is about that too, and “Final Fantasy” — I called it that because I was like, “This has to be the last time I go down these roads in my mind.” Then “I Just Keep Crying” is where I’m like, “I actually just need to feel the sadness I feel.” And then we start coming into the light again.
You’ve been on tour opening for Hilary Duff. I spoke with her recently, and she talked a lot about this tour being a really interesting moment where she has this incredible new album and is also out there performing her era-defining hits from decades ago. I wonder if you relate to that.
100%. Neither of us had toured for a very long time, so there was the very literal element of being on tour for the first time in ages. I remember the first few times we spoke, she was like, “How are you finding the tour bus?” And I was like, “I forgot how hard it is.” We’re not 25 anymore, and there’s nothing like going on tour to remind you of that. She had four kids in that time. I’m like, “I don’t know what I did.” At least she has a whole family to show for it. But there’s very much a feeling of: where did that time go? How on earth are we here? How is “Bulletproof” 18 years old? What the f–k is going on?
Now that you’re out on stage performing those older songs, where does your relationship with them stand?
It’s so much lighter. There’s nothing like time to humble you. I used to be so weighed down by what’s cool and what’s not cool, and I didn’t really like “Bulletproof” when I was younger — I felt like it misrepresented me as an artist. It’s the most different thing from the rest of my catalog. It doesn’t relate to everything else I’ve made. It’s kind of a one-off. But thank f–k, because it has paid for me to have the mental-health crisis I needed to have, and I’ll be eternally grateful to the song for that. It’s really lucky to write a song when you were young that can carry your whole career.
It sounds like you’re in a good place with it. I’ve read interviews with you in previous years where it seemed like that relationship wasn’t as good.
No, it wasn’t. Part of me hated it for a while, because it shot me to fame so quickly. I wasn’t ready to be big in America and Australia and Russia when I was 21. I resented it. I’m one of those people that likes to work hard for something. I like to feel like I’ve gotten somewhere for a reason, and I just put this song out, and it was suddenly globally famous. It actually felt really unsatisfying. I felt like I didn’t work for it. It just happened, and then it was like, “Great, how am I ever going to beat my 21-year-old self? I’m not.” And it pissed me off.
I see how that could be really destabilizing.
I also felt like the song has a more poppy, feminine energy than the artist I am. There have been a lot of remixes, and a lot of people think I make dance music because of that song and those remixes — I’ve always found that really annoying. I am way more the artist that makes “Tropical Chancer” and “Let Me Down Gently” and “Core Sexuality” and this album than I am the artist that made “Bulletproof,” which to me is a one-off. But it’s defined my whole image and career. I found that really irritating over the years. But I mean — of all the problems you can have as a human…
Do you feel like being on Hilary’s tour is training for your own?
100%. I’ve never played arena stages before, and being able to play to 15,000, 20,000 people on a regular basis has been great for my stagecraft. I was finding it quite difficult to fill the stage at first, and also because we were playing amphitheaters where nearly all the venues were seated — I’d never played seated venues before. That was a huge head f–k at first. But all of this only makes you better. I now walk on stage at these venues, and it doesn’t even cross my mind. It’s become so natural — and after 10 years of not touring, to come back and have this enormous learning curve has been amazing.
What does success for Cabin Fever look like to you?
It would be nice to feel like the alignment finally makes sense — that people can see the things you said you saw in the album, and feel that nostalgia. If I can get that across as a creative director as well as a producer, I’ll be super happy. For people to understand the world you’ve built is so important, and for listeners to want to explore that world.
I’d also really like to gain some new fans, because there is a sound shift on this record, and it’s intentional. I’d really like it to reach some new people who maybe wouldn’t have listened to La Roux before, but might now — and to realign myself with the audience that feels more akin to who I am as a person and as an artist, rather than just people who liked “Bulletproof.”
