Up to this point, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s music has reveled in the past. The band’s early efforts were full of banjo-flecked Appalachian folk songs, and while they flirted with less anachronistic styles on 2017’s The Navigator, that album spun tales of racial and cultural heritage dedicated to “all who came before.” Viewed from this perspective, Life on Earth is a sharp about-face.
Singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra (who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns) spends much of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s seventh album trying to outrun the past and embrace the present, admirably managing to find beauty in a fucked-up world. Segarra’s new perspective becomes glaringly apparent within the first 30 seconds of Life on Earth. “Go away from here, darling/The wolves have arrived at your door,” they sing on “Wolves,” as a silky midtempo electro-pop groove thrums around her.
On the very next song, the even more brazenly dance-oriented “Pierced Arrows,” Segarra is “trying to avoid running into [her] ex on Broadway” as the singer “keep[s] on running for the blue.” Segarra’s lyrics are rarely subtle, and their overreliance on obvious rhymes can sometimes be distracting (the chorus alone manages to rhyme “sky” with “die” and “cry”). But a little utilitarian wordplay works in service of such clear thematic ends.
While there’s a lot to run from in the world today—some of which Segarra candidly confronts here—an entire album concerned with running away could quickly get exhausting. But Life on Earth is far from just doom and gloom. After the first few songs, Segarra seems to find themselves not just running from but running to some kind of spiritual enlightenment.
On “Rhododendron,” Segarra’s head swims with conflicting images, of both natural wonders (“Nightblooming jasmine,” “a field of corn,” “full moon maple”) and haunting memories of “police barricades” and being “addicted to the high of violence.” But they seem determined to embrace the former: “I can’t look back,” they claim. “Everything I hate is gone.”
Segarra seems to find what they’re seeking on the hymn-like title track. Over a gentle, stripped-back piano melody, the singer surveys small moments of nature and humanity—both wondrous and horrific—and comes to a resigned yet reassuring acceptance of it all: “Spirit blinded by despair/Oh, but the lightning strikes/Do illuminate the night.”
Segarra is concerned with more temporal matters on the album’s back half, which features songs inspired by Trump-era immigrant detention policies (the heartbreaking, provocative “Precious Cargo”) and Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about Brett Kavanaugh (“Saga”). Even then, though, some vestige of that sense of peace remains. “Saga,” the de-facto album closer, is another song about being dogged by the past, but it doesn’t reprise the paranoia of “Wolves” and “Pierced Arrows.” Instead, Segarra’s narrator sounds triumphantly determined to not let old traumas define them, crying, “I just want to be free!”
The album takes the listener on a journey—one that’s as satisfying as it is because Hurray for the Riff Raff covers so much new musical territory with such self-assuredness, from guitar-heavy indie rock (“Pointed at the Sun”) to folk-punk (“Rhododendron”) to hip-hop (“Precious Cargo”). Indeed, with Life on Earth, they’ve achieved something truly enviable: a fresh start.
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