- Up and coming electronic chanteuse Lupa J has just put out her second EP, My Right Name. It’s full of dark, icy electronica, not really embracing contemporary beats, looking back instead to triphop and other, dancier electronica of the ‘90s.

The thing I find most remarkable about it is just how comprehensively it follows on from her debut, The Seed. Musically the two could be two halves of the same LP. You can say the same thing lyrically too: both records are driven a deep inner turmoil. Lupa likes to write in symbols and metaphors but -it’s a credit to her writing- they’re clearly comprehensible, communicating a search for identity and self that’s clearly frustrating, repetitive and destructive, but one that it’s not too difficult to feel some empathy for.

If you were to take it at its face value alone you might say that, in two years, Lupa’s made little headway. Intense self-doubt, a desire to hide from reality and unfulfilled fantasies of escape appear over and again. Still, Lupa’s eighteen right now and, hey, these are pretty typical teenage themes: visual metaphors of unwelcome reflections in the mirror, an undulating self-image, a mutating body and all under the paralyzing gaze of thousands of hungry eyes. It’s not really surprising to find Lupa in the same dark tunnel.

In addition, at the end of teenage years the search for a stable identity has taken on a new clarity. It’s right there in the title of the EP: My Right Name. If you listen to the lyrics of the title track, concluding the record, you’ll also hear her doing battle with an unknown ‘other’, trying to wrest from it the right to simply exist. “I wait for the day / Where you’ll know me / And call me by my right name.” That other is a nebulous being: sometimes like an authority figure, perhaps a parent? At others it could be the unreasonable demands of the public eye and at still others it even seems like it’s herself she’s wrestling with.

Musically the EP is just the right accompaniment for all that heartache. The same dark but brittle electronica as you’d be familiar with from Seed is here again, along with her trusty violin, which she continues to pluck with gusto. Cold, echoing electro-pop occasionally snarls into something fiercer. The electronics take on an industrial edge, which is appropriately brutal. I mean, Lupa never loses her **** Trent Reznor style, but rather gives herself a greater emotional range. The artists she references -explicitly and implicitly- are those who cut fairly mainstream public figures, but hide reservoirs of personal darkness: like Sarah Blasko or Laura Marling. Add in some shadowy electronica, a-la Massive Attack, Morcheeba or Moloko and you’ve got where Lupa’s at.

Broadcasting teenage angst can be pretty dull to anyone who isn’t a teenager but, even if Lupa J is in the same dark place where we left her last time, I find I’ve got an ear that’s strangely receptive to her woes. Honestly? I put it down to songcraft: the same thing which made her an unlikely success at sixteen is still working for her now.

I get the feeling Lupa J is about to leave her inner turmoil behind: you can hear an increasing stridency in her voice as she more insistently demands to be addressed by My Right Name. On consideration, I’m not sure what a well-adjusted, self-confident, twenty-something Lupa would sound like. I feel like a bit of an emotional vampire saying it, but the gothy teen Lupa J continues to deliver a lot, perhaps we should hold on to her for as long as possible.

- Chris Cobcroft.