Empress Of: Dream House review – a tender and openhearted rebirth after wildfires razed her house
Lorely Rodriguez contemplates the meaning of home – both physical and emotional – on a gorgeously humid, hopeful album that makes a virtue of her searching nature
Since the early 2010s Lorely Rodriguez has cut a restless, inventive figure. She’s slipped from raucous pop to silkier sounds, explored her Honduran-American heritage and, on her last album, flipped the staple awards season phrase “for your consideration” into a full-frontal club-pop meditation on uneven relationships. Her gorgeous fifth album makes a feature of this searching nature. Written after her family home burned down in the 2025 California wildfires, Dream House is about the rebuilding of that home – birdsong-dappled field recordings of its construction keep popping up – but also contemplates what it means to feel at home in yourself and with others. For all the violent loss behind the record, it sounds amazingly airy, free and open-hearted. The directness of For Your Consideration softens to a humid atmosphere that’s bright with hope, Rodriguez’s undulating synth lines bubbling with impatience and ecstasy as they cushion her soaring arrow of a voice. The bangers leap above the fray: SYW, featuring Cecile Believe, elegantly twists EDM to evoke an uncontainable desire; the equally yearning HandsOn sparks with glassy chimes and battering percussion. I Pray 4 U evokes the frisky joy of Jayda G, and Machete, dwelling on defiant post-breakup rebirth, slices like a laser through the night sky. Impressively, the calmer moments are no less arresting. Blue Light taps Dev Hynes for a slinky trawl through alienation and the title track wipes away trip-hop’s murk to expose its sweetness, more than fulfilling Rodriguez’s promise that “good things are coming”.
