Some albums move like a memory just out of reach, vivid in feeling but impossible to pin down. Wanted To Show You, the debut full-length from Chicago-based artist Lipsticism, creates that kind of space. It blends ambient haze with glistening house rhythms, and spectral pop with fractured balladry, all while holding a soft ache at its center. The sound feels both suspended and grounded, like light cutting through fog.
Lipsticism is the project of musician and producer Alana Schachtel, whose background in dance shaped an early instinct for composing through movement. Her music often begins with imagined choreography, building rhythm and tone around how a body might respond. On Wanted To Show You, she explores the desire to reach someone who is no longer there, tracing themes of grief, intimacy, and the strange beauty of emotional persistence. The result is an album that drifts, pulses, and glows—tender and quietly transformative.
Wanted To Show You will be released on June 13 by Phantom Limb. Pre-order a copy HERE. Follow Alana on Instagram HERE.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
As always, to start, let’s go all the way back. What are some of your earliest memories related to music and sound? Was there a lot of music around you and in the house growing up?
I grew up in a household that didn’t center music at all. My parents liked music but it was not a big interest for either of them. I heard Top 40 radio in the car or while out at shopping centers or other public places. I have always been really taken by and obsessed with music, my personal CD collection and Walkman were important to me and I spent a lot of time in my room listening to music and looking at the ceiling. I remember being in a car in Florida and hearing “Believe” by Cher while looking out the window. In my mind, I am looking at the ocean but I don’t remember if that’s true. Hearing “Believe” was so euphoric for me, I felt so excited and stimulated. I continued to have moments like that with music, and I still do. I think that experience of acute excitement is one thing that energizes and motivates me to make music often.
What prompted your first forays into playing and writing music? What were those early experiences like?
I dated someone in college who had the daw FL Studio. Prior to college, I had never encountered a daw (digital audio workstation). Seeing him work on it motivated me to download one, something clicked in my head like oh you can just download a computer program and start making music. My early music utilized a lot of stock plugins and vocals recorded on the voice memos app. I didn’t use the grid at all, I didn’t even perceive that one was there to be used. The music was really “free” but I always yearned for more technical ability. Now I kind of miss not knowing certain things.
Your work on Wanted To Show You feels deeply sculpted—both emotionally and sonically. When beginning this album, did you have a sense of its thematic shape from the start, or did it gradually reveal itself through the process?
Thank you! I did not have a sense of the album’s thematic shape at any point in the process. These songs came to be by way of me following every single impulse I had over the course of a few years, (I had started some of these prior to my last release Elapsed Kiss). It was important to me to respond to every single bud of inspiration I felt, whether that was a current emotional event in my life, a new musical discovery, or anything else. That was how I was able to have the energy and motivation to consistently work on this record, prioritizing any method that keeps energy and motivation up for me is important because I have struggled with those things a lot in my life. The album title was inspired by an amazing friend who was extremely encouraging to me. This is someone I showed my earliest music to, someone who believed in it and freely shared so much excitement all throughout every part of my journey in making music. When I first started making music I was so wracked with embarrassment and doubt, it was rare that someone “got” what I was doing and encouraged me to keep going. The experience of showing this person my music and hearing their thoughts has had such an incredible impact on my confidence and will and motivation to keep going. It’s something that I know has had a lasting positive effect on me, I’m so grateful.
You’ve described the record as grappling with the fleeting nature of relationships and the desire to connect with someone after they’ve passed. How do those themes manifest for you through sound design, texture, and form?
This is a really interesting question. Certain sonic qualities feel resonant with certain emotions to me, it’s like a subjective language. One thing that is central to my experience of grappling with the fleeting nature of a human life and the desire to connect with a person after they have passed is the intimidating mystery of it, these questions feel without answers, they feel unknowable. I have a lot of nightmares about death, and I find the concept of death to be nightmarish. The visuals of these nightmares are often gross, vague and disorienting, and intense. There are some moments on this record where the sound design feels representative of those qualities: pitch-shifted samples, foggy textures, and subdued voices are some parts of the record that come to mind. A lyrical moment that comes to mind is on the title track “Wanted To Show You” I sing: “I will never see you crawling out the earth.” I have trouble with the idea that a body is still a body after a person dies, it is still this form that is them but it’s not. I won’t be able to see it animated again. There was a death in the family when I was young and I saw the body in the hospital room, it is really preserved in my memory. I remember thinking about that when writing these lyrics. Oftentimes the process of lyric writing is just a response to memory or something I am working out emotionally or intellectually, it is a dialogue with myself.
There’s a striking physicality to the album in dense rhythms, lush synths, and a sense of spatial movement. How does your background in dance inform the way you build and structure music?
Thank you so much! I think my background in dance heavily informs my process of making music. I have shared this a lot at this point but when I first started making music I would first imagine choreography and then craft the sound to match that. I find dancing to be so euphoric, it’s one of the reasons I love music so much. I think when making music I am often on a hunt for moments that inspire movement and also inspire that state of “losing yourself” eyes closed, body moving without self-consciousness. I’m happy you noticed the spatial components, making music is such a visual experience for me in the sense that I see environments, colors, and forms when making it. I love crafting sonic atmospheres that are reminiscent of visual memories. It’s hard to explain this but say I am writing a song about a breakup, part of the inspiration for me is to try and sonically emulate the way the room looked when having that breakup discussion, the fog or sun outside, the qualities of the decor. Everything has a sonic analog, it’s so subjective though so I don’t expect others to get taken to the same place.
Across the record, your voice often feels like an element within the mix rather than something placed on top. How do you think about the voice as a sonic material when you’re producing and composing?
When mixing I often want the voice to feel well positioned in the mix, not obscuring anything else, like a watercolor that bleeds into everything else but in a way where the other elements are still very legible. I pushed myself to center my vocals a little more on this album to enhance some songs’ pop qualities, but I hope I did so in a way where the other elements still shine. I love wordless singing used for texture or melodic purposes. A lot of my favorite music has layers upon layers of wordless reverb-heavy vocals, spatially positioned in such amazing ways.
There’s a sense of both dreaminess and embodiment throughout the album, a kind of floating intimacy. What role does the tension between presence and absence play in your songwriting?
This is such a cool interview and I appreciate these questions a lot. Thank you. Damn, I don’t really know what role the tension between presence and absence plays in my music but I think you are really onto something. It’s making me think subconsciously this played a huge role but because it was not conscious it’s really hard for me to see clearly. Perhaps the “floating intimacy” is indicative of how much I want intimacy but can shy away from it because it’s scary and can be destabilizing. I also think it’s indicative of my love for a ton of different types of music and the different functions it has in my life. Certain activities, settings, or moods inspire me to put on something more ambient and peaceful and at other times I reach for something intense (and everything in between). I can’t help but want to express everything I love about music in my own practice with it.
Grief and longing surface across the album, but rarely in overt or declarative ways. Do you think music allows you to say things that you can’t express in other forms?
Yes, and you can obfuscate them so you feel the satisfaction of expressing something but the safety of doing so in a secret language to yourself. I also like foggy obfuscated ways of saying things, the process of trying to figure out what somebody means by something is really fun.
Collaboration with Angel Marcloid brought a distinctive mix and mastering aesthetic to the project. What drew you to working with her, and how did that collaborative relationship influence the final shape of the album?
Angel is one of my best friends. Working with her is so easy. She is incredibly talented and knows how to get things to sound exactly how you want them to. I wanted her to take the wheel creatively on this and she added so many things that felt so beautiful and resonant. She has an incredible ability of entering and realizing your world and also sprinkling her own world into it. It’s so cool I am perpetually so grateful to have found our friendship and musical collaboration.
What surprised you the most about making this record?
The way many of the songs are different from each other but when I listen back to the whole thing it sounds like one record with consistent sonic qualities to it.
To close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Thunderstorms, a million crickets and bugs on a humid day or night, rustling of grass or leaves in wind, an organ playing in a church, chanting in a church, the voice in general, every aquatic sound, droplets falling into water in a cave, this video online of like 4 or 6 tornado sirens harmonizing with each other.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
