Laurie Anderson Recasts Her Catalog on Let X=X With Sexmob

Laurie Anderson has always treated live performance as something more than a concert. Her new album Let X=X, recorded with the New York jazz quartet Sexmob, extends that logic to the recorded document. Instead of simply capturing a show, the album arranges its songs into thematic blocks—technology, angels, loss, late capitalism—with instrumental breaks that let you move through the set like chapters.

It’s a small structural decision that changes how the music lands. Anderson revisits older pieces, trimming verses or shifting sung lines into spoken word. “Ramon” and “How to Feel Sad Without Being Sad” are rebuilt so fully that only their core remains recognizable. Sexmob’s presence gives the whole thing a different weight, not as ornamentation but as a second voice that pushes the songs into jazz-inflected territory without losing Anderson’s deadpan delivery.

The album is out now. It doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Anderson recontextualizes her work in a way that makes you listen to the words again, and the band’s improvisational edge keeps the recordings from settling into any kind of comfortable glide. This is live documentation with an editorial spine, selected and shaped rather than just preserved.