“I literally wrote and sung this song, lost my voice, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for 10 years”: La Roux re-emerged from a long hibernation with a new album about a 'long and very painful breakup'

Whatever happened to La Roux?

It seems so long ago now, but Elly Jackson scored two huge hits in 2009 – Bulletproof and In For The Kill went to Number One and Two respectively in the UK. Her self titled debut album went platinum and for a couple of years the be-quiffed red head was a regular fixture in the British media.

Now she’s back and has issued a TikTok post which depicts her sipping a cup of tea (or a warm beverage of some description) with Bulletproof playing in the background. The accompanying text reads: “You think you can hurt me? I literally wrote and sung this song, lost my voice, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for 10 years.”

There’s a little bit more to it than that. After her critically acclaimed (but commercially under-performing) 2014 album Trouble In Paradise, Jackson disappeared for six years. She was about to release a third album, Supervision, in 2020, when the pandemic happened. It was postponed and then later cancelled altogether.

La Roux - Lose Myself - YouTube

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She’s also given an interview to AnOther magazine and elaborated further: “I’d only just finished my last album when the pandemic hit, so I wasn’t ready to start making a new record instantly. You need a gap before you make new work. I started fucking around with new sounds and new ideas.

"It took a couple of years to know if I even wanted to make another record or if there was any point – we didn’t know when the pandemic would end. But I’ve pretty much been in the studio every day since. It was just whether or not I liked what I was making enough to put it out.”

That new album, entitled Old Flames, is out in November, with a single Lose Myself already up on streaming platforms. According to Jackson, the record “charts the journey of a very long, drawn-out and painful breakup.

"It was the only relationship I’d ever been in, until now, and it lasted the best part of 20 years. As I got to the end of writing the album, it was clear that it was a sad prophecy. It’s about being free of something that I never really wanted to be free from.”

“But if you don’t know any of this stuff, if you’re just listening to it as a fun pop record, that totally works too. You don’t have to know the deep undertones – it’s pop, not emo.”