Between distorted bağlamas, post-punk rhythms, industrial electronics and a healthy disregard for musical borders, Istanbul trio LaLaLar have become one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from Türkiye since the release of their debut album in 2022. Ahead of their London Jazz Café gig on Tuesday 21 July, Burak Cetindag sat down with Ali Güçlü Şimşek (guitar, saz, vocals and songwriting) and Barlas Tan Özemek (bass) to talk about chaos, humour, politics, dancing through uncertainty and the constant reinvention that continues to shape the band’s journey.
Ali explains that life in Türkiye is already contradictory enough that trying to make tame music would almost feel dishonest. Politics isn’t something they consciously inject into their songs; it’s simply impossible to escape. “Every second is political,” he says. “There’s nothing that isn’t political.” Yet despite that reality, the band’s instinct isn’t to lecture. Instead, it’s to make life a little less colourless, to laugh together and to stay connected to ordinary people and life on the street without sacrificing curiosity or intelligence.
Ali and Barlas explain that rather than becoming the next chapter of Anatolian rock, LaLaLar set out to create something entirely their own. Their ambition isn’t to fit into an existing musical landscape but to become “their own island” on the world’s musical map, complete with its own oxygen, language and ecosystem. Their influences stretch from Rage Against the Machine, David Bowie, The Prodigy and Sepultura to Neşet Ertaş, the pioneers of Anatolian psychedelia Moğollar, and Barlas’s uncle Bülent Ortaçgil, whose Western-influenced acoustic songwriting helped redefine Turkish folk music. Yet none of these influences arrive untouched. They collide, mutate and re-emerge as something unmistakably LaLaLar.
Reviewers often describe ‘Bi Cinnete Bakar‘ as introducing listeners to an entirely new sonic vocabulary, while En Kötü İyi Olur sharpened that identity without sacrificing any of its unpredictability. Ali sees it differently. Chasing bigger hooks has never interested the band. Their priority has always been reinvention. The second album feels more confident, more distilled and, somehow, even stranger than its predecessor without ever losing sight of what made LaLaLar unique in the first place.
One of my favourite moments in the interview comes when the conversation turns to the so-called “Anatolian Psych Revival”. Many international listeners naturally group Lalalar alongside artists such as Altın Gün or Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, but Ali gently resists the label. He readily acknowledges that movement helped shape them, yet insists they are trying to document something else: not nostalgia, but the emotional geography of a city in transition. A transition that can be heartbreaking, but one that constantly fuels new ideas. The fragments of bağlama, breakbeats, distorted synths and sampled history are all there, but transformed beyond easy recognition. If, a hundred years from now, somebody listens back to Lalalar, he hopes they will hear not a recreation of the past but an honest reflection of what life felt like in Turkiye today.
The city itself becomes another character in the conversation. Their description of Istanbul avoids romantic clichés. It is simultaneously beautiful and bruised, forever collapsing and rebuilding itself. Rather than mourning its decline, the band almost mischievously imagine providing its soundtrack not celebrating destruction, but refusing to surrender joy to it. Even when discussing the country’s political, economic and psychological wounds, they somehow return to hope, humour and movement.
This optimism becomes even clearer when discussing the two albums. One of the interview’s biggest surprises is Ali’s explanation that Bi Cinnete Bakar has often been misunderstood. To many listeners it sounds dark, but for him the title refers to the possibility of finding a spark precisely when everything appears lost like jump-starting a car with a flat battery. That philosophy continues directly into En Kötü İyi Olur. Rather than opposing the first album, it completes it. The message isn’t naïve positivity; it’s the belief that perspective remains one of the few freedoms nobody can entirely take away. Even in difficult political and economic national or global circumstances, there remains value intrust, frienship, togetherness, humour and shared experience.
That sense of evolution also appears in how the band talk about making records. Ali reaches for a wonderfully simple metaphor: imagine a chair with four legs. Keep three exactly as they are but replace the fourth. Suddenly the chair is recognisably the same, yet subtly transformed. That’s how LaLaLar approach every album. They don’t want to repeat themselves but neither do they want listeners to lose the trust they’ve built. Every new record should unmistakably sound like LaLaLar just not the LaLaLar of yesterday.
Throughout our conversation, I kept returning to the band’s humour because it feels inseparable from everything else they do. Ali comments they never sound like musicians trying to deliver manifestos. They laugh constantly, interrupt one another and happily undercut their own seriousness. Asked how they know when a song’s constant twists and turns have gone too far, Ali shrugs with characteristic simplicity: “If we still enjoy listening to it, that’s our criterion.” Sometimes tracks are dismantled and rebuilt several times before anyone else hears them. Their only real test is whether they still excite the people making them.
The same instinct shapes their politics. They repeatedly reject the idea that Lalalar are trying to educate people. They’re not issuing public statements or writing manifestos. Instead, they write about the world as they experience it with humour, irony and playfulness. That refusal to become didactic may be exactly why the songs land so powerfully. People come for the groove and only later realise they’ve been drawn into conversations about power, ego, empathy and social responsibility.
Early on, the band described themselves online as “Fresh psychedelics from Istanbul”, only for Facebook to assume they were advertising drugs and promptly suspend the page. It’s a perfect Lalalar moment: absurd, funny and slightly surreal, much like their music.
The band speak warmly about their audiences abroad not because they understand every lyric, but because they recognise the sincerity underneath them. Ali recalls a comment left under one of their songs on Youtube: “I don’t understand a single word they’re saying, but I know they’re right.” For him, that was one of the greatest compliments the band has ever received. It proved that music, emotion and honesty travel much further than language ever could.
The fact that Iggy Pop is a fan is impressive enough. I still remember hearing the excitement in his voice on BBC 6 Music as he described LaLaLar as one of Turkey’s most innovative bands. But after spending time with Ali and Barlas, it became clear that their creativity runs far deeper than critical acclaim. It grows out of friendship, curiosity, humour, social conscience, chaos and a stubborn refusal to let either authority or musical convention dictate their path.
Perhaps that’s why calling them Turkey’s electro-punk anarchists doesn’t feel like an exaggeration. Their rebellion goes far beyond music, it’s a way of thinking. As they declare in Yalnız Ölü Balıklar Akıntıyı Takip Eder (Only Dead Fish Follow the Current): “Kölelik evvela kafada başlar” “Enslavement begins in the mind.” LaLaLar do the exact opposite. Rather than allowing themselves to be carried by the current, they keep swimming against it.
