Maud Latour's fans describe her music as being for people who “had the roofs of their houses lit up with stars in the dark” when they were children. These days, Latour sees her music as pop anthems for “main characters” for dramatic people with strong emotions, like herself.
“This app is for any girl who needs to put on headphones, where she can understand everything,” says the 24-year-old pop singer. “It’s for people who write in their diaries. It’s for people who love to feel all the emotions and have a strong range of emotions, and aren’t afraid to feel anything in a big way.”
In her first album sugar waterShe does just that. Over 12 songs, Latour grapples with the inescapable, almost paralyzing feeling that everything ends: friendships change, love changes, life changes. But it pulls her in when she realizes that to live life to the fullest, she needs to enjoy it as much as possible.
Latour took the title of the book from a Leo Tolstoy fable she learned while studying philosophy at Columbia University. Latour’s novel tells the story of a man hanging on the edge of a tree branch above a dragon ready to devour him, while mice devour the branch. His death is imminent. But suddenly he tastes a drop of sweetness on his tongue, and in that moment, even as his death approaches, things feel a little better.
“There’s sweetness in loss and tragedy and all the dark things in the world. Can you taste the sweetness knowing that things are ending? Does darkness exist?” Latour asks. “That’s what stuck with me and explains a lot of my heart and my music: it tries to make me feel like I’m living in another world. [be] “I live as long as I can, even if life ends.”
Overall, the album is a huge sonic leap from the pop music she delivered with her first four EPs. Most fans got to know Latour in 2020, when she scored a major hit with “One More Weekend” on TikTok. Like beabadoobee with “Death Bed” and Benee with “Supaloney,” “One More Weekend” was one of the first TikTok songs to launch an artist’s career. She even signed with Warner Records via Zoom from her Columbia University dorm room. “We were in the middle of the pandemic,” Latour says. “It’s crazy looking back because we were all online. No one even knew what TikTok was.”
Before uploading her music to the internet, Latour began writing songs at the age of 15. She was inspired by her globe-trotting lifestyle: she was born in Sweden and lived in London and Hong Kong as a child while her parents traveled the world for their careers in journalism. (Her father was once The Wall Street Journal Latour has served as executive editor and is now CEO of Dow Jones, while her mother covers credit markets for Reuters and other outlets. Through her experiences and travels, Latour says, she has found “this love of the world and curiosity about other people’s lives.” “I want to believe that strangers have more in common than we think, that any two people can have the same soul and spirit,” she says.
Maria Juliana Rojas for Rolling Stone
Her early music had a lyrical specificity reminiscent of Taylor Swift and Lorde with a touch of unparalleled optimism. Now, her life philosophies have evolved and she says she's lucky to have grown so much. “It was about me and my roommates. It was about my teenage dreams. I could see that dream so clearly, and it was a colorful explosion of my entire self,” she says.
This philosophy is everywhere. sugar waterThe album’s highlight is “Cursed Romantics,” a pop song about the beginning of a love affair—“Every time we touch, I turn to poetry”—before her fears finally take over: “I hope we never break up,” she repeats. Later in the album, there’s “Whirlpool,” which feels like the album’s thesis. “The difference between loss and love is just the letters and the drugs that you take, but I hope I don’t smoke it all out, because the pain lights up,” she sings. Latour explains that it’s a reminder to let herself feel it all and not drown those feelings.
Latour began writing the album on the seventh anniversary of her grandmother’s death. Although none of the lyrics are directly about her, she considers her grandmother her “North Star” in life and on the project. “Her favorite number was seven, and I knew that seven years after she died, I was supposed to write this album. Those 365 days of that year were going to teach me something new,” she says.
On the album and its existential vocals, Ronald evokes psychedelic rock, pure pop and even Dido. “Too Slow” is a “hyper-pop” song and “Summer of Love” has an electronic pop energy reminiscent of her previous albums. “The genres are so fake, and all the different sounds can fit under the lens of your soul,” she says.
Now Latour sees her past projects as “the foundation of my cinematic world.” sugar waterLatour built a new world, based on one principle: “How can I enjoy the sweetness of life before it ends?”
