INTERVIEW: La Roux releases her fourth album 'Old Flames': "This album touches on me letting go of old versions of myself, versions of myself that didn't serve me"
Interview: Shalane Connors
Image: Nabil
Published: 6 November 2026
As she came to create her fourth album, Old Flames, Elly Jackson, who performs under the name La Roux had to confront a number of challenges. The collapse of her 17-year relationship. Letting go of the past, as well as the expected future. A general public who thought that she stopped making music in 2014. Growing up, even. It’s no wonder she refers to the album, released today, as her phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes moment.
Old Flames is the sound of an artist shedding her old self, growing into a new person and emerging out the other side stronger than ever. The shedding of her old self is most apparent in the soundscape Jackson explores on the album. Gone is the signature La Roux ’80s synth-pop sound, and while the album still has a strong foundation in pop, it sees Jackson embrace a more expansive soundscape, with influences from R&B, hip-hop as well as harder dance sounds making its way into the album.
The first single, ‘Cabin Fever’, perfectly captures the cloying, exhausting feeling of being caught in something that isn’t working anymore, be it the collapse of Jackson’s relationship or her own musical style : ‘I’d rather not be holding on to something that’s nothing to me’.
‘Lose Myself’ switches between calmer, R&B verses with a harder electronic sound in the chorus, the chaos in the sounds a reflection of the pain Jackson expresses in the lyrics of being held back by a relationship: ‘The old me you never let me be…Signed out cause you always let me down.’
‘To Make Our Love’ samples the 1985 Mai Tai single ‘Am I Losing You Forever’, and has a tropical almost upbeat feel that masks the grief apparent in the lyrics: “Now we gotta let it all go … All I ever wanted was you and me”.
Sandwiched between the letting go and the breakup, the middle of the album deals with the delusion that can come as part of the recovery process. The R&B feels of ‘Final Fantasy’, ‘Night Vision’ and ‘Your Lover’ tell stories of passion and illicit love in contrast to the surrounding tales of heartbreak and moving on. On ‘Your Lover’ Jackson sings of a relationship on the side - ‘Hoping that your lover didn’t know about me’ - while ‘Final Fantasy’ is a open plea for a sexual relationship with her crush. ‘Gimme just a little bit baby…we’re like animals / Oh baby I need it’.
After the heartbreak and torment, the album ends with acceptance, recovery and the beginning of a new chapter in Jackson’s life. ‘Babyline’ has a perky pop beat which reflects the end of the struggle and the true phoenix from the ashes moment: ‘When the light is on your face / When you finally see through the rain / When its time to start again / Its your season’ she sings.
Old Flames is a reawakening of an artist held back by both her personal struggles and the accumulated baggage she has had to lug throughout her almost two decades in music. It is Jackson becoming more confident in herself personally and professionally, and the result is perhaps her finest collection of music to date. We met with Jackson when she was recently in Australia touring with Hilary Duff to find out more about the creation of the album.
Hi Elly! Congratulations on Old Flames., I absolutely love it. It's quite a sonic departure from your previous albums, you have moved away from the electronic disco style into something more cinematic. Talk to me about the the choice to go in a new direction and where those inspirations came from.
I realised I had a formula going from my last two records, and that was actually getting too unchallenging. I feel like listeners were getting used to it, and that's not a good place to be in as an artist. And as the person making the music, it's quite boring as well. You need a new challenge so you can carve new paths and surprise yourself as well.
I'd got to the point where I was like, okay, I'm at a different phase of my life. I haven't, as far as most people are concerned, made a record for a long time. Not many people know [previous album] Supervision came out because it came out three weeks before the pandemic. I had a real chance to just do something different. I really wanted to connect slightly more with what was actually going on in the world. There’s quite a few things going on in music, whether it be hip hop and some of the new R&B stuff that I actually really liked. I wanted to make a record that hit some of those points that I really liked about the music I was hearing. I started to pick up on some more modern production techniques, but also blending it with some of the pop music that I really missed from the late ‘90s and early noughties - SWV, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey.
I feel like it's going to be prevalent in the record I'm making now, that will come out next because I want to do that pretty quickly. I feel like I've gotten better over the years at creative direction, and I feel like I wanted to exercise that a bit more on this record. I realised there was more of a narrative to this record. It's bookended by reality and then in the middle of the album, it's all fantasy. I'm actually trying to make a film piece to display that, I'm writing it at the moment, so I'm really excited by that as well.
Amazing, so you're already on to writing the next album? Very prolific!
I don't know if I'd call myself prolific after like five years in between each album!
You wrote, produced, and arranged Old Flames completely by yourself. You're certainly not new to the production arena, you've worked as a producer on all of your previous albums, you're a Grammy Award winner, and you've sold millions of records globally. Have you still suffered from assumptions that other people have, that because your a woman, maybe other people have produced your records?
Yeah, of course I have. I think it's really tough as a female because if you have any man in the room with you at any point, they tend to get credit for what you did. No one's ever alone 100% of the time, right? When I do vocals, obviously it's difficult to run from the booth and then press record and then run back to the booth. But when I write, I'm completely alone. It’s become a huge problem in that I make a track, I’ve arranged it, composed it, I've written all the lyrics, and then I want to try something different sonically, I want to try approaching it slightly differently. I become scared to talk about the person I then did that with because in the past, when I've done that, that person then ends up getting production work for the next five years, and everyone goes, ‘Who is this genius guy?’ That's the bit that I find really tough as a female.
No one's ever asked me to produce anything for them. The frustration around you not being trusted as the person that's creating the sound of La Roux Is so irritating. I've spent literally non-stop 15 years in the studio, but at the end of the day, what you can do is keep doing what you do and hope that people understand and get eventually that it is you. The cherry on the top would be being asked to produce something for somebody else because it just it happens to guys all the time.
Is that something you would find creatively fulfilling, producing someone else's work?
It would depend on the artist, it would depend on the music. Obviously, if I hated the music, then no. I think it would solidify the fact that I was being trusted in what I'm saying that I do. The difficult bit is production is a hard thing to imagine women doing. We don't have many role models, we don't have much visual evidence of it. When we see people in the studio standing at mixing desks, they're guys. It’s a space where there are less of you, and you just have to keep doing it. And luckily, I make music for me, and I get to make the music I like. I'm lucky I get to do that, you know?
Where did your love of music originate from and how did that transform into your career in your early days?
I just love sound. I love, ever since I was a kid. I remember when I first heard ‘There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)’ by Eurythmics. There are certain tracks that you hear as a kid and it's going to a sonic sweet shop. It's like someone's giving you musical crack. You're just so incredibly excited, and they're so unique to what they are. Like sound pockets of just joy, just pure joy. Music can completely and utterly change the way you feel, and it's not tangible. You can't touch it. It’s like someone's designed sound in the air that you can then listen to, but you can't touch it. It's like someone designed the air for you. It's one of the most incredible things you can do, give that feeling to other people. I'm always trying to crystallise that feeling that I have and get it as accurately as I possibly can into a piece of music, and then hoping that the feeling that I had inside is then shareable in the best way humanly possible. You design the air as best as you possibly can for that person to experience in the same way. I just think there's no greater joy.
You've described Old Flames as your phoenix rising from the ashes moment. It is an album born out of a period of heartache and immense change in your personal life. It touches on subjects of addiction, evolution, identity. Talk to me about that experience of transforming pain into art. Is that something that you find necessary from a therapeutic level?
Yeah, I think if you're not doing that, what are you doing? Songs need to be about things. Sometimes you don't know what they're about when you're writing them, and then it only becomes clear later on, which can actually be really cathartic. There's a couple of tracks in the album like that. I didn't really understand what ‘Lose Myself’ was about until some time after I'd written it.
This record, it's the music, but it's also what was going on in my life while I was making it. I was in the only relationship I've ever been in until 2024. Shedding the old version of La Roux. Shedding that and what people expected of me and what they wanted La Roux to be, plus me shedding what my perceived future was. When you think you're going to be with somebody for the rest of your life, and then you're not, there's a lot that you have to let go of. The person you thought you were is wrapped up in that as well. Letting go of that's really amazing when you've let go of it, but the process of letting go of it is really hard. This album touches on me letting go of old versions of myself, versions of myself that didn't serve me, that I thought were helping me in various ways and just weren't, and. That's where the fantasy element on this album comes in with ‘Final Fantasy’, ‘Night Vision’ and ‘Your Lover’. There's moments on this record where I'm just completely and utterly lost in delusion, and I'm letting myself get lost there for the last time before I kind of move on and actually grow up. This industry can keep you in your teenage years for a while. Being a pop star is quite a teen thing to do. The fear of growing up in it is palpable, you want to be Peter Pan forever, you know. Letting go of that and going, ‘actually, I do need to grow up’, is kind of what Old Flames is sort of all about. And there's been a lot to let go of, so it’s been great.
That's so true. I've never heard someone put it that way, but there is so much emphasis and importance on being young in this industry, especially as a woman. So the whole ageing process in the spotlight is fucking terrifying.
It's hard, it's really hard. Staying young on the outside feeds into staying young on the inside. All my other friends were having families and getting married and stuff like that, and I was in the studio, smoking weed! It's not cool, like, grow the fuck up! It’s just taken me a while to get there.
Old Flames is out now via Universal Music. You can buy and stream here.
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