La Roux: Old Flames review – a breezy, hook-packed twist on a breakup album

(Vertigo)Devastating moments are dressed up with warm production and kinetic 00s R&B in the now quiff-less singer’s grownup fourth album

Over the six years that La Roux, AKA Elly Jackson, was making her fourth album, the singer ended a 17-year relationship, confronted her weed dependency, received autism and ADHD diagnoses and lopped off her signature Johnny Bravo-esque quiff. One might expect the resulting record to be meditative and maudlin; the opening songs Cabin Fever and Lose Myself, focused on poor mental health and addiction respectively, suggest it will be fraught and claustrophobic. The former’s suffocating bass and unsteady synths segue into the latter’s unnerving nursery rhyme-like verses and thrashing chorus, reminiscent of the crunchier elements of HIStory-era Michael Jackson.

What follows, though, is an autopsy of a relationship delivered through kinetic turn-of-the-millennium R&B and 90s-indebted pop. Jackson resists melodrama and, even at its most devastating, the songs are dressed up with enticing hooks and warm production. “Feels like you’re slipping right out of my life,” she admits on To Make Our Love, though the song bounces along like Ace of Base’s All That She Wants, while Night Vision, despite its crushing lyrics – “you keep building me up and then letting me go” – recalls the top-down breeziness of Mariah Carey’s Heartbreaker.

Refreshingly, Jackson seems more interested in journeying to the other side of heartbreak than relitigating it. “Stop waiting for that love that keeps making all that pain,” she sings on the sun-dappled Babyline. It’s a hard-won realisation on a grownup breakup album that suggests it’s OK not to be bulletproof after all.