
Eternal Rhythm: Lilys - Better Won't Make Your Life Better
In 1994, the Lilys released Better Won’t Make Your Life Better, a swirling, shimmering masterpiece that captured the zeitgeist of indie rock’s most adventurous era while gazing into the rearview mirror of pop’s past. It’s an album that feels both wilfully anachronistic and oddly prescient, drenched in a yearning for something intangible, something pure, yet unobtainable.
Kurt Heasley, the band’s enigmatic leader and sole constant member, seemed to channel the entire British Invasion through a uniquely American filter. You hear echoes of The Kinks’ wry melodicism, the psychedelic haze of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, and the baroque complexity of The Zombies, but it’s all warped through Heasley’s singular vision. While many contemporaries sought to tear down rock’s past or reinvent it entirely, Lilys embraced its contradictions. The result is music that feels strangely familiar yet utterly disorienting—a sonic mirage that slips through your fingers when you try to pin it down.
Opener "Ginger" sets the tone, an effervescent burst of jangly guitars and Heasley’s diffident vocals that feel like a lost transmission from 1967. But it’s not pure pastiche—there’s something fractured and uncanny about the way the pieces fit together. The production, handled by Heasley and a rotating cast of collaborators, has a deliberately off-kilter quality, as if the album was recorded in an attic studio littered with broken reel-to-reel tapes and dusty Mellotrons.
Tracks like "Claire Hates Me" and "The Way Snowflakes Fall" revel in the kind of melancholy that’s too self-aware to be maudlin. There’s a wry humour lurking beneath the surface, a recognition that longing and loss are part of the human comedy. The melodies are impossibly catchy, but they’re wrapped in layers of fuzz and reverb, as if Heasley wanted to obscure their shine just enough to keep them from feeling too accessible.
Perhaps what makes Better Won’t Make Your Life Better so captivating is its refusal to offer easy answers. The title itself suggests a resigned ambivalence, a knowing wink at the futility of trying to fix what’s inherently flawed. It’s an album that invites you in with its hooks and harmonies but keeps you at arm’s length with its elliptical lyrics and unpredictable shifts in mood.
It’s an artifact of a time when indie rock was still defined by its sense of possibility, when bands could explore the outer edges of their influences without fear of being pigeonholed. In Heasley’s hands, the past is not a trap but a prism—a way to refract his singular voice into something timeless.
Michael Azerrad once described indie rock as a space where “small voices could say big things.” With Better Won’t Make Your Life Better, Lilys didn’t just say something—they created an entire world, ephemeral and enduring, like a half-remembered dream that stays with you long after you’ve woken up.
Pick up a rare 1998 pressing from us here