This “ambient transsexual” homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (“his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background”) was inspired by the eleven months spent in Iowa after “avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains.”
Unsurprisingly, that move was a bit of a culture shock, as OHYUNG traded raves and Brooklyn nightlife for “prairie sunsets, transgender care bans, all-ages hardcore shows, screaming hog farms, corn reaching for the heavens, tornado sirens, big beautiful skies, the world’s largest truckstop, and a brutal winter,” but she also notes that Iowa gave us Arthur Russell, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Transcendental Meditation as well. Fittingly, the album mirrors that unique mixture of beauty and menace and shares Springsteen’s own pared-to-the-bone starkness, which is quite an unexpected and haunting reinvention in the wake of 2025’s stellar pop-minded opus You Are Always On My Mind yet remains every bit as compelling (if not more so).
In a roundabout way, it seems like OHYUNG could not have made Iowa without making a “pop” album first, as it got her thinking about what remains “when she removes the scaffolding” and “grinds up the bones of the song.” Notably, she did not treat that as a purely rhetorical question and concluded that the answer was “ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, and late-night gloom.” To my ears, it seems like OHYUNG used that as the starting point of Iowa, then built upwards from there using a palette of “mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads.”
Notably, the opening “purgatory” hits upon almost all of those elements and serves as quite an effective statement of intent, as subtly warped choral samples drift through a spacious landscape of seismic sub bass wobbles, hiss swells, nightmarish howls, breathy synth chords, and “massive subwoofer activations that could be heaven’s kick drum or the slam of an AI-guided bomb.” At first, it all feels a bit disjointed and unfocused, but it soon becomes hauntingly beautiful once the chord progress syncs up with the interwoven swirls of celestial choral samples.
While it seems fair to describe the rest of the album as eleven other variations on that same theme or at least the same sustained vibe, it feels analogous to watching a world-class chef confidently prepare an array of excellent meals from the same small and simple batch of fresh, well-chosen ingredients and some of those “meals” ascend to truly sublime heights. In lead single “all dolls go to heaven,” for example, clipped swells of tape hiss evoke rhythmically crashing waves while the bittersweet and sacred sounds of an angelic choir drift across my beachside idyll like an elusive dream. I especially love the organic unpredictability of those hiss swells, as the occasional crash of an unexpected larger wave adds a nice counterbalance of elemental power to the hazy, slow-motion beauty of the choral samples.
Elsewhere, “nevada” tweaks the formula with more deep, reverberant subwoofer bombs and streaking, glassy melodies that languorously undulate over tender, slow-motion chords and frayed, smeary choral samples that feel like faint radio transmissions from heaven. My favorite piece, however, is probably “the black angel,” which weaves together hauntingly angelic and mysterious choral loops, whispers, and footsteps to approximate a killer beatless deconstruction of Aphex Twin’s own absolutely killer deconstruction of Gavin Bryars “The Sinking of the Titanic” (“Raising The Titanic”). While the rest of the songs do not quite scale the same heights, they certainly do an excellent job of sustaining Iowa’s mesmerizing spell and it is that spell that makes this such a unique and beautiful album, as OHYUNG had a bold vision of desolate beauty and gorgeous melodies that flicker in and out of focus like ghosts and she absolutely fucking nailed it.
