Q&A: Have You Ever Felt Like a BUZZKILL? Lyn Lapid Gets It
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY GIGI KANG ☆
Photo By Caity Krone
PARTLY INSPIRED BY HER EXPERIENCE OF MOVING FROM SUBURBAN MARYLAND—to Los Angeles, 22-year-old Lyn Lapid’s new album BUZZKILL, released on April 25, follows the progression from not belonging to accepting oneself fully.
BUZZKILL is not static; it’s a journey. The first half of the album examines feeling like a misfit, the lack of meaningful connections, and not having a clear definition of home through tracks like “coraline” and “forecast.” The second half of the album includes tracks like “take me as i am” and “it doesn’t kill me anymore” which embrace self-acceptance.
With co-signs from Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, and Jungkook, Lapid’s songwriting rooted in vulnerability is clearly enabling her to expand her reach and find listeners who are also experiencing loneliness, conformity, and the sometimes uncertain journey to confidence. This summer, she’ll meet them on her headline BUZZKILL world tour.
“I’ve never been to Europe,” Lapid shares. “I’m excited to go to London, Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam, Manchester. I’ve never stepped foot in Europe so I’m just excited to do all the touristy things, along with performing over there.”
Read my conversation with Lapid about BUZZKILL below.
Photo By Caity Krone
LUNA: to love in the 21st century was about navigating love and the uncertainties that come with falling in love with someone. BUZZKILL is more of an individual experience—it’s about your coming-of-age story. Did you find your songwriting process was different this time around, in terms of how you approached your lyrics?
LAPID: The last project was based on a bunch of collective experiences between me and my friends. With this album, it was me going into writing rooms with these emotions and ideas that I’d written for myself and alone. The difference with this project was how vulnerable I was. I think I was able to get away from that with the last project because I wasn’t completely writing about my own experiences. For this album, because it’s solely my experiences, it was a bit challenging to be as open as I was.
LUNA: A major theme of the album is longing for meaningful connections. I often feel that if I can’t find such a connection with people, music is a space where I can feel understood. As an artist, I’m sure you feel similarly. How would you describe your relationship with music?
LAPID: I view writing music as a way for me to express my emotions completely honestly. Listening to music is a way for me to not feel alone in these very niche situations that I experience where I feel like I’m the only person in the world feeling these things. I appreciate when my favorite artists talk about experiences that bring out their humanity. I love doing that with my music too. I love to use my music as an outlet to express myself truly and honestly, but also as a way to find other people who feel the same way.
LUNA: Another theme is self-acceptance which the second half of the album really leans into, more so than the first. How did you decide on the structure of the album?
LAPID: The whole album tells the chronological journey to self acceptance and to get to that end goal of realizing who I am. I have to establish those tougher emotions in the beginning where you find yourself lost in a new space and you don’t really know where you quite fit into an unfamiliar setting, especially in the context of moving to a new city. I feel like that was the way I decided the order of the album—it was first painting that picture, then seeing what I could make out of that by the end.
LUNA: I love when a project is super cohesive. We see that in the BUZZKILL imagery. The music videos all use a lot of the color red. There’s a recurring party environment. How did you land on that creative vision?
LAPID: I feel like the beginning of the album and the end, they both match in terms of visuals. The beginning of the album illustrates all of these party scenes, group settings, where it’s a bit uncanny. You find yourself lost in these group settings. But by the end of the album, visually, we painted [the image of me] alone, but in a way where that wasn’t a bad thing.
At the beginning, with all these people that I was surrounding myself with, I felt like a buzzkill because I was surrounded by the wrong people. By the end, I’d let go of wanting to be liked by everybody, letting go of wanting to fit in everywhere, and just allowing myself to either be alone or allowing my circle to narrow down to people who cared about me as much as I cared about them. I think we illustrated that really beautifully.
LUNA: The track “take me as i am” is all about self-acceptance. What is a quirk of yours that you love about yourself?
LAPID: I’m a person that loves the quiet. I love when I can just be with my friends and do nothing. I think I’m very reserved with the most limited social battery (laughs). Being around people that I care about, just being in their presence, is enough for me. I’ve realized over time that I love silence and calmness, and I would much rather have a movie night rather than go to the club or a party.
