La Roux's fourth album arrives loaded with biographical weight: a 17-year relationship ended, a weed dependency confronted, autism and ADHD diagnoses received, and even the signature Johnny Bravo quiff gone. All of that could have produced a record that demands your sympathy before earning it. Old Flames mostly doesn't make that mistake. The opening two tracks seem to promise a different, darker album. Cabin Fever sits on a suffocating bass and unsteady synths that feel genuinely claustrophobic — a song about poor mental health that sounds like one. Lose Myself follows with nursery-rhyme verses and a thrashing chorus that Jackson herself compares to the crunchier registers of HIStory-era Michael Jackson, and she's not wrong. For about seven minutes, you're bracing for forty. Then the pivot. What follows is primarily an autopsy of a relationship conducted through kinetic turn-of-the-millennium R&B and 90s pop — Ace of Base, Mariah Carey, production that feels sun-dappled even when the lyrics are devastating. 'Feels like you're slipping right out of my life' on To Make Our Love lands against a bassline that bounces. Night Vision's 'you keep building me up and then letting me go' arrives wrapped in top-down breezy Heartbreaker-era Mariah production. The contrast between lyric and sound isn't ironic — it's the point. Heartbreak dressed up because you have to keep going. The structural argument of the album, if it has one, is that melodrama is a trap. Jackson is more interested in what's on the other side of the pain than in the pain itself. Babyline — sun-dappled, almost euphoric — delivers the thesis: 'Stop waiting for that love that keeps making all that pain.' That's not a pop platitude here; it's what the whole album has been building toward, a hard-won adult realisation that the bulletproof persona of earlier La Roux was always a coping mechanism, not a destination. The risk the album doesn't quite escape is tonal sameness in the middle section. When every devastating lyric is dressed in warm hooks and 90s production, the contrast that makes the best songs work starts to feel like a default setting rather than a choice. The album's intelligence is real, but it occasionally irons out the difficulty it's supposedly processing. That said, the hooks are genuinely good — not nostalgia-bait good, but structurally good, the kind that justify the production choices rather than hiding behind them.
