Sometimes, if you want to come home to yourself, you have to shake off everything you once thought was real. Human Human, the debut album from Chicago singer, songwriter, and producer Carlile, shines a beacon from that seat of transformation. A full-hearted and inexhaustibly generous pop treasure, Human Human radiates with the joy of unfettered self-acceptance -- and all the awkward, terrifying moments of surrender it takes to get to a place where you can finally fall in love with your own beautiful mess.

Carlile is the middle name and performance alias of Emily Nichols, a graduate of Columbia College and a longtime figure in Chicago's thriving underground music ecosystem. Over the past decade, she's issued a streak of glossy synthpop EPs while performing at storied venues like Metro and Pritzker Pavilion. Through those years, she meticulously laid the groundwork for her debut LP, now due to release from Sooper Records. An unselfconsciously playful and thrilling work of synth-pop, Human Human recalls the warmth of Robyn and the luster of MUNA in its bold, sweeping arcs. This is an album that savors the pleasure of splashing a full rainbow of feeling against the wall.

The first songs on Human Human started revealing themselves to Nichols at the beginning of what would turn out to be a stage of intensive recombination in her life. She was visiting her parents' home in Kansas City when she first started writing "Illusion," a glittering pop song about clearing the veil from a relationship turned sour. "I was at the end of my twenties, and I think that’s a period of change that we’re not really warned about," Nichols says. "Life becomes more serious. I had gotten out of a relationship that hadn’t been working for a very long time. I was feeling pretty defeated at that stage -- a lot of unknowns. Everything just caught up to me at once."

As they came to her, these songs felt like they marked the beginning of a new chapter for Nichols' work. In February of 2020, she moved to Los Angeles with two friends in the hopes of growing her musical practice into a full-fledged career. A month later, the COVID-19 pandemic froze the world. What was supposed to be a period of new growth turned into one of frustration, fear, and dire uncertainty. But amid the terror of a pandemic unfolding, Nichols saw a chance to step back from longstanding habits and expectations, and sink more deeply into her music.

While she continued writing, Nichols also focused on expanding her production skills, a step that allowed her the freedom to realize her songs from spark to execution, down to the last details. "Prior to this album, I took a back seat role for production. These were the first songs where I was leading the charge," she says. "Often, when I would bring a song to a producer, it’d be this experience of, this is great, but what if I changed everything about it? To have that experience time and time again, you lose some confidence. Starting to work with people who valued my ideas gave me the ego boost I needed to say, I have good ideas and with the right collaboration I can make something beautiful."

Partway through 2020, Nichols packed up and moved cross-country again -- this time to Michigan, where she worked on a friend's farm and lived in a converted shipping container in the middle of the woods. In the quiet of the rural Midwest, away from any city and any scene, she found the space she needed for her songs to blossom. "I wasn't going to shows, I wasn't seeing people. The comparison that many of us put ourselves through in creative fields, that disappeared," Nichols says. "I’d light a candle and I’d have the glow of my computer screen and I’d just sit, feel my feelings by myself in the woods where no one’s watching. I could just cry or laugh or feel whatever I wanted to feel, and then express that through the art."

Through a chugging WiFi hotspot and shaky power source, Nichols collaborated remotely with a lineup of seasoned Chicago instrumentalists. Her Sooper labelmate Luke Titus contributes drums to the seething, industrial "Neosporin," while Neal F. O'Hara plays synthesizer on “The Single” and the winking closer "Don't Get Married While I'm Gone." Joey Meland, who records as COCOJOEY and previously produced Carlile’s 2019 Back Seat EP, pours an abundant, billowing atmosphere into the string-streaked “As I Am.” Macie Stewart of FINOM (formerly Ohmme) blows out the breakdown of "Life of the Party" with a jagged, denatured guitar line.

Nichols worked with longtime collaborator Noam Wallenberg to crystallize the demos she had been recording in isolation. "We did the most pandemic listen-through. We sat outside of Noam's place six feet apart with the speaker out of his window listening to the record for the first time," Nichols says. "While Noam has mixed all my previous releases, this was our first go at producing together, which worked very well -- it’s very true to all of the original ideas." Together, Nichols and Wallenberg drew out the brightness that rings across Human Human, spangling songs like "Illusion" with delicate vocal accents and sowing layers upon layers of freewheeling harmonies into "Fake Nice."

A few of the vocal lines on Human Human are taken from Nichols' original demo recordings, which had a spirit she couldn't quite recreate in a studio environment. She sung them from an open, unguarded state; in sharing them, she invites her listeners to melt down their own guards and join her in a place where no emotion is too oversized to express.

"For the first time in my life, I feel proud to have big feelings and proud to be sensitive. I think those things are in shortage in the world," says Nichols. "I've been shedding my shame. This is actually a wonderful thing I have -- the ability to feel."

Sasha Geffen