REVIEW: Lila – You Can’t Fix Everything [EP/2025]
Artist: Lila
Album: You Can’t Fix Everything – EP
You better learn how to be alone.
Despite the negative popular connotation that downtempo seems to get, I defy the listener to find a genre that so magnificently blended raunchy, overt aggression with jarring emotional introspection. Enter Lila, a new project from ‘Sabella’s Nick Bollock. While Lila might not be a pure downtempo band, they find themselves in the same alternative metal niche alongside ‘Sabella (for good reason), Subtract, Yuth Forever, Tormentor Absolute and more, utilizing a groove-heavy onslaught laden with bouncy, lurid breakdowns to hammer home a bleak, ravaging and emotionally relentless experience. A raw, bouncy instrumental canvas with equally raw, gritty and emotionally bare lyrics cast over top, You Can’t Fix Everything is a riveting salvo of dissonant, callously honest depravity made for the moshers, plain and simple. Whether its bass drums that sound like cannon fire or shrill, heart-rending vocals that shred the listener to ribbons, Lila stand as a resounding testament to a bygone time in heavy music, effortlessly weaving together instrumental simplicity with emotional complexity to create something heavy, but impactful all the while.
I sharpen the knife and it bites back. Everyone you love appears dressed in all black.
You Can’t Fix Everything sounds a fair bit like the title—a tired, exasperated sigh, coupled with a shrug and a prolonged goodbye to a weight left too long on your spine. Residing somewhere between a strung-out, caffeine-and-nicotine fueled bender and a somber, red-eyed drive home through the dark, Lila finds the listener. Songs like “Tab” and the introductory cut “Unfinished Paintings” serve as an energetic kick-start, stringing together fun, groovy percussion and bouncy, ebb-and-flow chugs that weave riffs into breakdowns without second thought. Other songs, “Berger Lake” for example, is a bleak and dissonant interlude, drenched in feedback and noise enough to send the listener spiraling into a cold-sweat drenched psychosis. Where Lila never manifest as an instrumentally complicated band, the percussion and fretwork work beautifully together, borrowing elements from metalcore and downtempo both to create something that resides squarely in neither genre, but is remarkably reminiscent of both. Each song feels like a sharp bite through the listener’s flesh, leaving an aching burn in its aftermath, just for the next song to open wide and dig even deeper. Whether its the dancy drumming in “Warning” or the explosive concluding breakdown to “Press Eject” that fades into eerie silence, Lila sound like 2014-2016 in the best way possible.
Existing has become a chore.
While the instrumental approach could be described as a blistering eruption coupled with a slow burn, Lila’s vocal element is bitter and abrasive in all the ways one would expect from a band channeling the heavy music milieu from the middle of last decade. Shrill screams and piercing screams work overtime throughout You Can’t Fix Everything, and the delivery–in a bewildering, anxious stream-of-consciousness belting–makes them feel fresh and different from just about anything else out there. While the vocals are unique–and as they work well–they aren’t what steals the show; that would be Bollock’s lyrics. Lila write sentence after sentence of purely relatable angst, whether its the melancholic musings about one’s own purpose on “You Better Learn to Be Alone” or the haunting tour through past failure on “Tab,” Bollock’s lyrics and delivery throughout Lila’s debut EP is fantastic, and a remarkable complement to the simple-but-monstrous instrumental approach that allows the EP to hit like a train. It’s hard to pick a favorite—or even most impactful—line, rather, it seems that listeners will find a particular song or moment that seems to speak directly to their own history, as was the case for me when hearing “Tab.”
I still smell the horseshit and sawdust.
Nostalgic in the right ways—and in some of the emotionally uncomfortable ways—You Can’t Fix Everything is a shrill, gnarly, angsty slab of smoldering misanthropy that is raucously heavy but cunningly introspective in a way that (I believe) only music in the downtempo and downtempo-adjacent bands could be. Heavy enough to make you hurt and boldly honestly enough to make you feel, Lila demonstrate that you can’t fix everything—and some things don’t even need fixing to begin with.
9/10
For Fans Of: ‘Sabella, Kaonashi, Yuth Forever, Introvert, VCTMS, Kingmaker
By: Connor Welsh
