Allie X herself remarked to fans (which she labels “X’s”) that, while they might not have been expecting a new era so soon after Girl With No Face (especially since she’s been known to take three and four year breaks in between albums), the new era of HIGGY, as she’s branded her next record, couldn’t be stopped or contained. And time will tell as to what HIGGY might be an acronym for, but, in the interim, her lead single from the record, “Is Anybody Out There?,” provides a glimpse inside the mind of “a woman in her clear cube”—this being one of the labels she’s given her new alter ego, used to describe herself in the captions of photos whilst appearing in a clear cube amidst such settings as a Jack in the Box parking lot and the woods. Divergent locations that reveal, perhaps, that no matter where you go, there you are—trapped inside your mind with your tortured thoughts.
Because the cube, of course, is a metaphor for the isolation of being inside one’s own “vacuum-sealed” brain, as it were. The pain and agony of only knowing for certain that your mind is all that’s sure to exist, and not really being able to comprehend who another person is because you can never comprehend for sure what they’re thinking—or, hell, if they even have a mind (an ever more valid suspicion these days). Even those who might be closest to you, whether as a friend or creative collaborator. In the case of the latter, Allie X addresses the sorrow of losing the person who helped her co-write and co-produce the song, Bram Inscore, acknowledging his 2023 suicide via the lyrics, “Genius that I wrote this with said, ‘So long,’ took his life/If I stay too long here I don’t think that I’ll survive.” Indeed, this notion of not being able to survive in a world so cruel and cold that it makes everything about life even more dangerous than it is at a baseline level is a recurring motif in “Is Anybody Out There?” A guttural scream demanding to know if anyone else happens to notice how fucked up this all is, or has everybody gone totally comatose?
Hence, Allie X’s aura of combined resignation and earnestness when she sings, “Gotta get ready for the rapture, stop my blasphemy/Is anybody out there?/Is anybody out there?/Is anybody listening ‘cause I’m not hearing anything/I think I might be in this world alone/Is anybody out there?/I don’t know.” Being a Los Angeles resident for over a decade now (she moved there in 2013 to pursue her music career), Allie X also has an even more innate sense of isolation/“living in a bubble” than the average person (read: a non-Angeleno). Not to mention a greater sensitivity to and understanding of the devastation wrought by the multiple wildfires that ravaged the city at the beginning of January.
So it is that she honors her adopted city (and the adopted city of so many others) when she says, “Santa Ana winds, they came, they scorned us and we burned/Now the insurance brokers got morose and taciturn’d.” Her poetic turn of phrase is in keeping with her “Victorian garb,” as she described it in one of her promos for the single (a mock tabloid about a “strangeling” who “rock[ed] ladies of the country club”—a Del Rey-ian kind of sentiment). Further intensified by a hairstyle befitting a very kooky queen. In fact, it’s not totally unlike the “coiffure” of what Helena Bonham Carter’s Queen of Hearts (a.k.a. the Red Queen) sported in Alice in Wonderland. Just much higher and more divided into two distinct “pieces” on each side.
Referring to herself as the “Infant Marie” throughout these visuals that show her encased in a glass cube, Allie X provides comfort to those who have grown more fearful in recent times of what it means to keep enduring. The irony of present-day survival being that, if you do keep staying here too long, you won’t survive. Certainly not with the newly-minted emotional and physical rigors of the twenty-first century.
And so, once more speaking to the increasing perils of living under various governments that treat humans as non-sentient (though maybe that’s only fair considering that humans treat every other living thing like they’re non-sentient), Allie X mentions another highly specific incident (and one that would have also been a big deal in L.A.): “A million Yogi tea bags got recalled for pesticide/If I stay too long here, I don’t think that I’ll survive.” These horrified reflections are complemented by the subtle psychedelic sound of the track, further amplified by The Beatles-esque tone of it (think: sonic elements of “Dear Prudence”).
As for the accompanying visualizer, directed by Cal McIntyre (because “visualizers” are basically music videos now), Allie X of course appears in what is now her “signature” clear box, situated in what looks like a recording studio. Pacing the confines with a conductor’s baton in hand, her earnestness and desperation are most apparent in the delivery of her final answer to the question posed in the song. And that answer is: “I don’t know” (Lelaina Pierce of Reality Bites is familiar with realizing that, too).
Alien undertones of the song aside, there’s also, of course, the fact that Pink Floyd once posed an “inverse” sort of question on “Comfortably Numb”: Hello? (hello, hello, hello)/Is there anybody in there?/Just nod if you can hear me/Is there anyone home?” Which perhaps just goes to show that, for quite some time now, humans have been wondering not just if there’s “anybody” out there, but if there’s anybody with a shred of humanity still left out there.
Perhaps this being the concern that bridges the endless divide caused by solipsism. For it’s the one thing that many can presently seem to agree on. Because, when taken to mean “the belief that only your own experiences and existence can be known,” Allie X reminds that many of us do know one common experience: loneliness. Feeling as though no one can ever truly understand us, or the pain we’re going through. And “Is Anybody Out There?” absolutely cuts to the core of that feeling on a visceral level.
