"It explores our deepest fears in the face of radical change": Lake Malice announce debut album I Wanna Know If It's Real

Lake Malice have announced their long-awaited debut album, I Wanna Know If It’s Real.

After spending several years building a name for themselves in the alt. scene, the duo are dropping the album on September 11 and they’ve got a new single, Ghost In A Hell, coming on Wednesday (June 10) ahead of their appearance at Download this weekend.

The album finds Lake Malice digging into themes as diverse as social media addiction, AI anxiety, nostalgia, trauma, identity, success and what separates being authentic from mere performance.

“We wrote this album thinking about how we wanted something autobiographical, but also able to capture a moment in history and the feelings of a generation. As millennials, we’ve gone through such a unique and drastic change in how we manage our social connections and how self-worth is measured, and we’re now also witnessing the advent of AI, which is a crucial part of what inspired this record,” says vocalist Alice Guala. “In a matter of a few decades, we lived without the internet, then with social media, and now with AI.

“This isn’t an anti-AI statement or an anti-technology one. Rather, it explores our deepest fears in the face of radical change, and it questions whether any of the values we deemed important will last through this change.”

Alice continues: “We had tons of questions piling up in our heads about what we’re going through as a collective: Am I your friend if I can see what you’re up to every day but never actually talk to you? Are we building connections because we care for each other, or for personal gain? Are we making art if we skip an entire process and use a prompt to create it all from scratch? Are we making music to express ourselves or to go viral? It questions whether everything is a means to an end, and if it is, then how do we recognise the reality of things?”

The album has been preceded by the singles Scatterbrain and Nobody Wants To Be You, which both came out last year.

I Wanna Know If It’s Real tracklist:

1. Scatterbrain
2. Ghost In A Hell
3. Nobody Wants To Be You
4. Chrome Red
5. rly ok
6. EtheReal
7. 3D Robocop
8. Real Life
9. 90’s btch
10. Crystallised
11. M.C.E (Main Character Energy)

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