Delicate. Intimate. Nostalgic. White Summer is everything we’ve come to expect and hope for from Netherlands-based project la loye. It’s an ambient and carefully blended alt-folk dream pop composition. The young 24-year-old Lieke Heusinkveld is the mind and heart behind the project. Her work is poetry in both word and sound. Heusinkveld’s gentle, melancholy vocals float in and out of delicate expressions of atmospheric, finger-plucked guitars. If you lean into the sound a little closer, you hear lighter- and perhaps more hopeful- distant touches on the piano. It’s sad and exquisite with its carefully crocheted delicacy. The sound looks like my grandmother’s lace layered over a thick, dark, heavy piece of muslin.
Or perhaps it’s more like the fragility and beauty of a butterfly caught carefully in a glass jar. la loye makes an art of capturing a moment of emotion, turning it over and around slowly, reflectively, describing in sound each of its angles and sensations. Heusinkveld says of White Summer, “I’ve never really felt comfortable in summer. I can often feel very gloomy and melancholic during this particular time of the year and it always seems to create a distance between me and the rest of the world.”
