Four years separate laye’s 2019 debut project, lonesome, from its follow-up, losers, and while the Montreal singer has retained her flair for fusing dark lyrics and bright melodies, the scenery around her has changed dramatically. Gone are the futurist post-Lorde productions and digi-R&B beatscapes, replaced by Weezer guitar fuzz, Phoebe Bridgers’ indie aesthetics, and repurposed Radiohead lyrics. It’s the sound of a chill alt-pop phenom embracing her true calling as a fiery alt-rocker. “I actually listened to more music like that growing up,” laye tells Apple Music. “Because my other project was so synth-based, I just really wanted to do the opposite this time around. During COVID, when I wasn't releasing music, I kind of tried everything out and did a lot of different types of music. And I feel like this was the style that felt like the most like me, and it felt right for the music I was writing.” But while losers is more raw in execution, it’s highly conceptual in design. What appears on the surface to be an eight-song EP is actually a continuous narrative told in four chapters, complete with a full-circle conclusion that thematically links the last song back to the first. Here, laye explains the story behind losers, track by track. “I saw god” “There's four stages to this EP. The first few songs are the love songs, and the next three are the messy kind of stages, and then the next two are the heartbreak songs, and then the last one ends with it being less about a relationship and more about me needing to find myself. So 'I saw god' starts off the whole album with this love song. It's actually the oldest one that I wrote on the project—it was the first one written and the first one to open it.” “you’re my achilles heel” “I was on a writing trip in LA, and for this session, the producer that was originally supposed to be in that day actually canceled last minute, but my boyfriend is a producer as well and he ended up being available that day. We were on our way to the session and we were in the backseat of an Uber, and he was just playing this guitar riff that he had on a voicemail from earlier that day, and the first line that I kept singing in the car was ‘you are my kryptonite,’ and I wanted to go deeper into this idea of all-consuming love and the unhealthy sides of a relationship. 'I saw god' starts things off with this sweet love song, and then ‘you're my achilles heel’ just dives into that. The second verse starts with 'you're my Lexapro' and then it ends with 'you're my life support,' and it's just an unhealthy way to love someone. And so this is kind of a prelude to where the rest of the songs end up going.” “sunday scaries” “Honestly, at this session, a few of us were hungover writing it and we had some Blue Moons going around, and it just felt like a fitting concept to write about. I'm a very anxious person, and like many people, I've used alcohol as a crutch in social situations. And I wanted to write about the aftereffect of that: the next day, when you're almost more anxious because you're thinking about the night before. I think when you're forming relationships while you're in an altered state of mind, it's easy to question those relationships after the fact and think about what was authentic and what wasn’t, and it leaves you feeling more lonely and more isolated. This is probably the most upbeat song on the project, and it feels the lightest, but it's probably the one that speaks the most to being lonely.” “touching myself” “Going into this session, I was really listening to '9 Crimes' by Damien Rice a lot. I love that song. It's about cheating, and I wanted to look at that from a different angle and talk about the gray area between fantasizing about someone and emotionally cheating, but do it in a fun way with really raunchy lyrics. I feel like with all these songs, you're looking at a really lost human being before you get into the actual heartbreak songs. You see the breakup coming with these behaviors described in these lyrics.” “my last cigarette” “The growth that happens in this song, sonically, felt really special. And then lyrically, it obviously speaks about addiction to a person in a situation, but it's more so about not being able to let go of something once you've had the clarity that you should. Metaphorically speaking, every time you say you've had your last cigarette, you go out to a social event and someone else has one and they offer it to you....it's an easy 'yes.'” “blue” “This had to be the first song in the portion of breakup songs, because it's about looking back at something and realizing you're at fault. When you come out of something, it's easy to really bash yourself and look at where you went wrong and want to repair it, but it's too late. So this is just about being really sad and missing somebody. It's a guilt trip.” “Unhappier” “I definitely wanted to flip the 'I hope you're happy' sentiment on its head. Obviously, when a loving relationship ends, you do wish them well. But right before that happens, if you're the one that you feel was done wrong, or you were blindsided or you're really hurt about it, I feel like there's that period before you wish them well where you just don't want to see anything about them—you don't want to see your friends posting about them, you don't want to see how they're doing. You just kind of want to block it out, and if you're really bitter, you wish them unwell. But I feel like I needed to say that because I had ‘blue,’ and that was putting everything all on me, so then ‘Unhappier’ is flipping that and saying, ‘OK, but you're also missing out on me and what we could’ve had.’” “backseat driver” “I put 'I saw god' at the beginning because it's the first love song, and it has that line about being in love 'in the backseat of a car,' but then you get to 'backseat driver' at the very end of the album and there’s me out of love and just really trying to get in touch with myself more. It leaves everything as a question mark. It's a messy ending. It takes the EP away from it being about a relationship and more about it being about me as a lost human, and I eventually need to figure out what I'm doing with myself. It's about being kind of a drifter, and I think I wanted this project to end on that note, because I think it was important that it wasn't just about this relationship. There's more going on here.”