Lucifena has spent enough time around heavy music to know exactly how seriously some people take its rules.
Her response is considerably simpler.
“F*** the rules.”
Today (September 11th), the Los Angeles artist releases her 19 track debut album, WARZONE, through Young Money, bringing together a musical history that has rarely moved in a straight line.
Before Lucifena, there was You Only Live Once, the post-hardcore band she fronted through the 2010s. After that band ended in 2018, she moved into a solo career that increasingly pulled metal apart and rebuilt it alongside rap, industrial music and electronics.
That path eventually caught the attention of Lil Wayne and led to Lucifena becoming Young Money’s first female rock signing.
Now comes WARZONE
The album moves through shoegaze, hardcore, alternative rock, metal and rap across 19 tracks, but Lucifena isn’t particularly interested in deciding where one ends and another begins.
The title describes something broader, too.
“WARZONE is something that was years in the making. The inspiration behind it was war—the internal war within my own spirit, war with love, war with the music industry, and seeing the forever global wars around the world. My only goal for this record is to make people feel something in the music.”
Lead single ‘Tyrant’ brought Lil Wayne directly into that world, while ‘IT’S YOU’ pushed the album towards release.
For Lucifena, however, WARZONE isn’t simply about demonstrating how many sounds can coexist on one record, it’s about having the freedom to make them coexist without asking permission.
We spoke to Lucifena about WARZONE, Lil Wayne, misogyny in heavy music, rediscovering her screamo roots and the song that forced her into particularly uncomfortable territory.
Lucifena ‘Tyrant’ ft. Lil Wayne
Warzone’ pulls from shoegaze, hardcore, alternative rock, metal and rap. Were you consciously trying to break genre rules, or have those boundaries basically stopped existing for you?
Lucifena: I have creative freedom where I’m at so I’m blessed to make what I love and what inspires me. I see no boundaries, I do literally what I feel. F*** the rules that most of the industry tries to force on us artists to follow.
You came up through post-hardcore and Warped Tour before moving into trap metal. Is there anything about that younger version of you that you deliberately wanted to bring back on ‘Warzone’?
Lucifena: Yes, I wanted to bring back some of that 2000s screamo vibes but obviously make it Lucifena with the genre bending.
Young Money has such a strong identity in hip hop. Coming in as its first female rock signing, did you ever feel pressure to prove heavy music belonged there?
Lucifena: Yes, I feel the need to really expand the average listener to something that they’ve maybe never heard or experienced before. I think it’s so sick to represent my world in a space of real icons and legacy.
Lil Wayne apparently heard you scream and that helped get his attention. What does Wayne understand about heavy music that people might not expect from him?
Lucifena: He genuinely loves heavy music and believes in it so much he put me on his label. Wayne is not only a genius but he’s an innovator and I love that he just does what he likes and doesn’t give a f*** what anyone thinks that’s real punk rock of him.
You’ve spoken about being underestimated as a woman making heavy music and feeling like you had to go harder than the men around you. Do you still carry that chip on your shoulder, or have you stopped feeling like you need to prove anything?
Lucifena: I still carry that chip on my shoulder, haha, but that’s also why I got such a fire behind what I do.
‘Warzone’ deals with battles in relationships, within yourself and inside the music industry. Which part of the record was hardest to actually admit out loud?
Lucifena: There are some parts of the album where I’m really talking my shit and I’m fully confident in that mode and then there’s some songs where I am a lot more vulnerable like one in particular called broken vessels that when I wrote, I was at a really low point and I was battling a lot of different inner turmoil and I think that is probably the most vulnerable songs I’ve ever written so I think that one is hard to admit out loud for sure.
Heavy music is having another huge cultural moment, but people still get territorial about what counts as ‘real’ metal or hardcore. Does that gatekeeping piss you off, entertain you, or motivate you?
Lucifena: It’s funny that people get so worked up on what they consider metal or hardcore I usually laugh because I know what I’m doing at least pulls a reaction. What actually annoys me is a lot of misogyny within the comments like it really shouldn’t matter what I wear, sometimes I wanna wear baggy clothes sometimes I wanna wear latex f*** off.
Once ‘Warzone’ is finally out and you don’t have to explain what it is anymore, what do you want people arguing about?
Lucifena: I think I’d want people arguing what songs resonated with them the most. It’s 19 songs. Each song comes with real life experiences, real emotion, real trauma haha. I just want it to connect with the people that feel it.
Lucifena On Her Own Terms
There is something useful about that final answer. For all the discussion surrounding genre, Young Money, metal gatekeeping and where Lucifena fits, she isn’t asking listeners to settle on a definition.
She wants them to pick a song. Across 19 tracks, WARZONE gives them plenty of room to argue.
There is the confidence Lucifena talks about, but also the other side she identifies in ‘broken vessels’, written while she was dealing with what she describes as “inner turmoil”.
Those contrasts make more sense of WARZONE than trying to draw a clean line around its genre.
Lucifena came from post-hardcore, moved through trap metal and now finds herself releasing a debut album through the label Lil Wayne helped turn into a hip-hop institution.
She doesn’t appear particularly concerned about whether those pieces are supposed to fit together.
“I see no boundaries,” she says.
WARZONE is out now through Young Money.
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