Caroline Polachek

Caroline Polachek has been making music since the late 2000s, first as the lead singer of Chairlift and then under her own name, and the trajectory from there to here is one of the more interesting stories in contemporary pop. The album that changed how people thought about her, Desire I Want to Turn Into You, came out in 2023 and immediately landed her in conversations she had not been part of before.

Chairlift, which she formed with Patrick Wimberly in 2005, made two albums that were critically admired and commercially modest. The second, Moth, came out in 2016 and was their best work. When the band dissolved in 2017, Polachek had already been releasing solo material under the name Ramona Lisa. She dropped that alias and began recording as herself.

Pang, her solo debut under her own name in 2019, introduced the aesthetic that Desire would expand: an interest in early music and Baroque textures layered over electronic production, with melodies that moved in unexpected intervals and lyrics that treated emotional experience as something physical and architectural. Her voice, which is more technically precise than it often sounds, became her most reliable tool.

Desire I Want to Turn Into You arrived with bagpipes, flamenco clapping, and Dido interpolations, and none of it felt gratuitous. It is a record that sounds like nothing else released that year, and the live show she built around it matched that ambition. Polachek has spent her career moving toward something. Desire suggests she found it.