Elektra Day - Last Nights
review by Bethany Tyresus

Listening to the Last Nights EP—a six track release put out with debatably tacky swiftness mere weeks after the untimely death of Elektra Day this spring—one initially feels sort of cheated. Is that it? Is that all there is? We all got so caught up in this singer’s dramas so intensely for a moment, and all there is to show for it is twenty-odd minutes of music, much of it unfinished? My first listen, I was annoyed, bristling at the hype machine I felt had “gotten” me somehow. I was pissed at how taken in I’d been.
When media buzz began about Elektra’s debut album—before it became increasingly clear that there would be no album, that she was in no state to record—I was as excited as anyone. The track or two I’d heard, the music video I’d seen, they certainly contributed. But honestly, I think a great deal of my excitement was inspired by the handful of photographs of her making the rounds on Tumblr, and a couple of odd, lo-fi cover recordings that seemed to point to a kind of morbid sensibility I was drawn to. Her Instagram account became a mild obsession of mine, a steady stream of images that presented her as a multiplicity of tropes: a long-dead star already faded out of view, an apparition out of the distant future, a rebellious rock n roll party animal, a little girl playing dress-up in a blonde wig and bright pink lipstick.
I suppose the great disappointment is not that Elektra Day was not as strange as we had hoped—yes, her music is largely straightforward, formally non-threatening, but with an overt violence and dissonance rarely found in this kind of pop—but that she was what we wanted her to be: odd, and tragic and ultimately, it seems, very, very sad. The world was a little bit too much for her, or perhaps the other way around. Bearing in mind the context, a career that went up and out like flash paper, a brilliant microcosm of cultural capital in the digital age, my second listen through was a radically different experience.
It’s fairly obvious while listening to divide the EP into two parts. “Toxotitties”, “Poison”, and “My My” are songs that nearly everyone delving into this recording has heard before, singles released in anticipation of the full-length that never came into being. They have their distinctions in style and collaborators, but are generally in the same aesthetic wheelhouse: poppy, synth-driven music about violent death. If this description surprises you, here’s a quick breakdown:
“Toxotitties”, a collaboration with Chicago grime-pop group Celine NEON, is a song of female revenge, enacted against those who would violate a woman’s consent. If you fuck me with your eyes, I will end your stupid life. I think part of why this song (and its accompanying video) gained such traction online was the way it gave a pop voice to the kind of misandrist persona that has really taken off in certain parts of the internet. The three women glare directly into the camera, looking murderous, threatening to meet violence with violence.
“Poison” is a variation on this theme. The protagonist assures her (presumably male) lover(s?) that if he should wrong her, the poison’s goin’ in your mouth. We can take this metaphorically, but the song’s bizarre bridge guides us otherwise. Its eerie, wordless, multilayered singing, guttural moans, and breathing crying act as the soundtrack to some implied scene of extreme violence. It is difficult not to read this track as related to Elektra’s extremely fraught romantic and artistic relationship with rock musician Eddie Fagen. Their on-again off-again drama was splashed across gossip blogs nearly from the start, with the evidence of mutual mistreatment ranging from Elektra’s cryptic, rapidly deleted Instagram posts to paparazzi photographs of Fagen with myriad women, to videos of rampant cocaine use and semi-public screaming matches. If you meet a girl like me, you better treat her nice.
“My My”, the last song to be released before Elektra’s death in a car accident in Los Angeles, was co-written with Fagen, with vocals from both singers on the track. This fact exacerbated rumors that Fagen was ghostwriting all of Elektra’s music, an accusation that she repeatedly expressed her frustration with.
Unlike the previous tracks, which are essentially murder ballads for the pop scene, “My My” is a suicide song. When love wounded me, I thought how best to bear it, and when I could not master love, I thought it best to die. These opening lines are taken from a contemporary translation of Hippolytus, a classical Greek tragedy that tells the story of Phaedra, a woman driven to suicide by ill-fated desire. One is tempted to take it as a pointed reference. The song lacks some of the graphic violence of the “Toxotitties” lyrics or the soundscape of “Poison”, but it also seems more… decided. Love will murder me, the song asserts, and you will have to bear it.
Elektra’s death was, at least on paper, an accident. It was the kind of accident that so often comes of mixing drugs, alcohol, fast cars, a reckless spirit, and a lack of anyone stopping you from doing whatever you please. But looking at photographs of Elektra between the release of “My My” and her death a few months later, I see a woman in free-fall.
The second half of the EP is comprised of a live recording, an unfinished song, and a very early demo. While fans were certainly hoping for a trove of complete, previously unreleased music, but despite the disappointment these pieces work together to flesh out a fuller picture of Elektra’s potential future trajectory as an artist.
“Brother” is a retro-sounding pop ballad that invokes some of Elektra’s influences that may not be apparent in her other recordings. There’s a lot of classic girl group feeling here, and Day has mentioned her love of The Chantels and The Marvelettes in interviews. There are also certainly flashes of Amy Winehouse, whose blend of classic soul and contemporary sounds made her famous, before her music was overshadowed by her personal struggles. Winehouse, too, became a member of the 27 Club after her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011.
This track, as well as “To The Water”, points to Elektra’s musical beginnings before her move into pop. The scant circulating recordings and the singer’s own off-hand descriptions tell us that her early music was largely folk and soul-inspired ballads. She played the Midwestern dive bar circuit for a time (Day, as far as we know, grew up in Michigan somewhere outside Detroit), before essentially disappearing for two years until her reappearance as a pop artist in Los Angeles. Her allusions to this transition were generally vague. “I guess you’d think I’d be singing sad slow ballads and not this poppy stuff… I tried that for a while but it didn’t really make me feel any better so I tried something else.”
This recording not only reveals her early musical influences, but as a live recording, it also gives us a sense of what Elektra could have been like as a live performer. Elektra’s first tour was canceled two weeks before the first performance, citing vague medical problems and fatigue. On “Brother”, with Elektra accompanied only by a pre-recorded loop and without any vocal effects, we get to hear her perform in a way we largely missed out on, and imagine what those shows might have been like.
“Dirt”, an unfinished collaboration with art-pop act Fee Lion, was recorded in February 2015, during Elektra’s final weeks. It has a way more rock sound, and in a droning, radio-unfriendly way. It’s tempting to read this track as the potential new direction her music would have taken if she had averted disaster, as the next thing she might have tried to see if it made her feel any better. The vocals are largely wordless, presumably placeholders. The only lyrics are chilling in hindsight: a little bit of dirt goes a long way down.
The last track of the EP, however, struck me as the most affecting. A demo recording by Elizabeth Johnson from the years before she became Elektra Day, “To The Water” is a touchingly amateur folk ballad. The song itself is not remarkable or even good, but you can hear the potential there. A fuzzy, repetitive guitar and a couple of mandolin licks accompany a vocal performance that is overlong but earnest. The song’s protagonist has seen and suffered a lot for her age, but she is still ready to risk it all for love. Her faith has not yet succumbed to cynicism. The direct, almost adolescent sound hits home in contrast to the questionable authenticity of the later tracks that put Elektra on our radar.
Overall, Last Nights is by no means the unfinished masterpiece audiences were led to expect, but is also more than what is seen at first glance. The record is a touching disappointment—a fitting tribute to a life lost too young.