This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Rilo Kiley always had an uncharacteristic sense of drama for an indie outfit. When the band went on hiatus in 2008, they should have been celebrating their biggest success: their last album, Under the Blacklight, was their first on a major label and their biggest hit by some distance. Instead, they imploded, the tensions that had made the band great finally becoming unsustainable.
First, there was the tension between co-founders, co-vocalists and songwriters Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett. Both former child actors, they’d been a couple when they formed a band in the late nineties: when they broke up, the band carried on, precariously.
But there was also the tension between credibility and success, which meant something in the noughties when people still talked about selling out.
You could hear this anxiety all the way back in “Pictures of Success” from their debut, Take Offs and Landings. In its opaque but suggestive lyrics, Lewis — her voice sweet, light but with a satiric edge — sings about yearning for “big money”. “When you’re dead, it must be nice to finish,” she sighs, with the kind of world-weariness you can only really commit to when you’re in your twenties.
The website Pitchfork, in an unusually vituperative review even by its own high standards, called Take Offs “boring” and “self-consciously precious”.
The album sounds thin in places, a little rickety and unfinished. But it’s also got all the defining qualities of the Rilo Kiley records to come: it’s melodic, acerbic and romantically cynical, both in the sense of being cynical about romance, and in the sense of romanticising cynicism.
Over their following two albums, The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous, Rilo Kiley shed their indie fragility and started to sound like a proper rock band. Lewis’s voice got richer.
The once-ambiguous lyrics gave way to confident, vivid storytelling: the other-woman narrative of “Does He Love You?” culminates in a gut-punch twist that would make a novelist proud.
Under the Blacklight is tighter and glossier still (co-producer Mike Elizondo has worked with big mainstream acts including Gwen Stefani and Sheryl Crow). But despite giving the band their first proper hit, a lot of people who really like Rilo Kiley, really don’t like this album.
That included Sennett for a long time. I love it, but have to concede that despite the pop swagger, it’s the band’s bitterest record.
Prostitution comes up repeatedly in the lyrics, especially on “Moneymake” and “Close Call”. “Funny thing about money for sex, you might get rich but you die by it,” sings Lewis on the latter. In retrospect, it’s a distillation of all the band’s fears about whoring themselves. The end of Rilo Kiley had been written: one song on Under the Blacklight is even called “Breaking Up”.
Sennett went on to release music with his bands The Elected and Night Terrors of 1927. Lewis had a solo career that built on the commercial foundation Rilo Kiley had established (her 2006 solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, is a white trash soul odyssey that influenced a generation of female indie artists; you can hear traces of her influence running through Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.)
But the band’s demise wasn’t official until 2011, when Sennett was asked about Rilo Kiley’s future in an interview. “If Rilo Kiley were a human being he’s probably laying on his back in a morgue with a tag on his toe,” he said. “Now, I see movies where the dead get up and walk. And rarely do good things happen.” He followed up by telling another journalist there had been “a lot of deception, disloyalty, greed”.
Someone must have wished on the monkey’s paw, because in 2025, after 17 years as a corpse, Rilo Kiley reformed and went on tour, reaching the UK this June.
When they step on stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire (their second night in London, and the date I see), they don’t feel like a zombie outfit. They feel blissfully, brilliantly alive. Whatever beefs they had with each other have been put to bed.
There’s a real depth in seeing middle-aged people revisiting the songs they wrote as callow young things. (There are no plans so far for new material.) Rilo Kiley’s fixation on mortality (see: every lyric I’ve quoted here) might come off as an affectation from a band in early adulthood. In their fifties, though, there’s poignancy.
“Portions for Foxes”, from More Adventurous, is a manifesto for sex as a means of railing against the dying of the light. On the album, you could take it as a clever bit of unreliable narration from a self-deceiver: the song’s protagonist needs to believe time is short, because it justifies her impulsiveness.
Played by Rilo Kiley now, it just sounds true. Life isn’t long. Maybe you should do what feels good — especially if what feels good is getting your band back together. “Pictures of Success” undergoes a similar transformation. There’s a real weight to the “when you’re dead” chorus once you’re nearer the end than the beginning.
“Pictures of Success” is the last song they play, and the last lines hit hardest. “These are times that can’t be weathered/And we have never been back there since then,” declaims Lewis passionately. But Rilo Kiley have weathered it, and here they are, back again, against all probability. It is, to quote another of their lyrics (from “Spectacular Views”), “so fucking beautiful”.
