Lila Forde to Release New Album LIFE CAN STILL BE SWEET

Lila Forde, an artist who moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, has announced a new album titled LIFE CAN STILL BE SWEET.

The album, Forde's sophomore release, is out October 2nd.

Lila Forde isn't trying to sound like anyone else. She's too busy becoming herself.

With a voice steeped in jazz, soul, folk, and old-school American songcraft, the Seattle-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter has always carried a deep sense of self through her music. But on Life Can Still Be Sweet, her sophomore album out October 2nd, that self comes into fuller focus: A little older, a little wiser, more instinctive, and more firmly in command of the world she's building. Warm, whimsical, and full of growing pains, the record captures Forde in the thick of her twenties – chasing songs, learning lessons, finding her people, and holding onto beauty even when life gets hard.

'I think I have a really unique voice – not just my literal voice, but my proverbial voice,' Forde says. 'In this day and age, and in this industry, there's a lot of trend following, and there's a lot of homogeny. I'm just really trying to be my own artist.'

That individuality has been there from the beginning. Raised in a spiritual, music-filled household in Seattle, Forde grew up without a television and with her feet in the dirt – the daughter of a musician and meditation teachers who encouraged her to stay curious, grounded, and creatively free. She sang in choirs, studied jazz in college, and steeped herself in the classics, from Bonnie Raitt and Carole King to Ella Fitzgerald and Nancy Wilson, while developing a soulful Californian sound that feels unmistakably her own.

Her 2025 debut album Vessel introduced that world with grace and intention. A confident, cathartic coming-of-age record, it arrived after Forde's Top 5 run on Season 24 of The Voice, but it was never defined by the television spotlight. If anything, Vessel affirmed what had already been true: 'I want to be a vessel for the music,' she said at the time. 'I'm here to serve it.'

A year later, Forde sees that debut as both a milestone and a mirror. 'You put out a record and it's like a past version of yourself,' she says. 'As time goes on, you start to view the record in a different way, almost as a diary entry.' She remains proud of Vessel – proud to hand the vinyl to fans on the road, proud to call it her first record – but she also hears the distance between who she was then and who she is now. 'It does feel like a different Lila at this point,' she reflects. 'It feels like a very special debut marker on my career.'

Life Can Still Be Sweet is the sound of that next Lila arriving in real time. Where Vessel was recorded before The Voice and released after a long gestation, this new record feels present in her hands – immediate, timely, and deeply connected to the life she's living now. 'I feel really excited, like it's an alive thing,' Forde says.

The past year, for Forde, can be summed up in one word: Collaboration. Since releasing Vessel, her world has 'exploded like a garden blooming,' full of new friendships, new creative relationships, and new musical possibilities. Unlike her debut, which was made with producer Aidan Carroll, Life Can Still Be Sweet came together through a wider constellation of players and co-writers, including Joey Dosik, Marcel Camargo, Kaveh Rastegar, Larry Goldings, Ryan Lerman, Eva Scow, Misha Adair, her brother, and the band she formed and toured with over the past year.

Yet for all its moving parts, Life Can Still Be Sweet is unmistakably Forde's record. 'It's produced by me,' she says. 'There's a bunch of different producers and collaborators throughout the whole thing, but I am the one who put the baby together, and is fully holding the baby.' In making it, she learned she did not need to hand the songs off to someone else and hope they came back sounding like her. She could trust her instincts, make the final decisions, and steer the boat herself.

That confidence lends Life Can Still Be Sweet its shape. The record glows with Laurel Canyon warmth, old-school soul, country twang, jazz-rooted phrasing, Hammond organ, three-part harmonies, and live-band richness – a mature, cohesive sound that feels both easygoing and deeply considered. 'We had just gotten off the road, and we had two days in the studio, so we just went in there and recorded all the songs as we had just played them on the road,' she says. 'My band is such a huge part of this record.' This lived-in energy is the album's pulse. These are songs made by real people in rooms together, shaped by chemistry, instinct, and the kind of trust that only comes from playing night after night.

The title track sits at the heart of it all. Forde began writing 'Life Can Still Be Sweet' while she was on The Voice, stuck in hotel rooms in Burbank, singing the same songs over and over, her creative bandwidth stretched thin. A verse slipped out anyway: 'Where'd all the time go? / I've been looking out this window for way too long.' The rest came later, but the feeling stayed the same – a reminder that even inside chaos, uncertainty, and exhaustion, life can still be 'the most delicious thing.'

'The 20s are a very wild and exciting time,' Forde says. 'They're strange and they're unfamiliar, and it's just full of growth… You're like a toddler outside, and you're just figuring out who you are as a person.' For her, the song came to represent this entire chapter: Living in Los Angeles, making music for a living, learning how to stand on her own, and finding sweetness inside the scramble. 'There's devastation, and there's change, and there's heartbreak, and there's all this stuff,' she says. 'But through it all, life can still be sweet.'

That phrase holds even deeper meaning in the context of Forde's family. Her mother, a classical pianist, was diagnosed with Parkinson's three years ago – a reality that has reshaped the past few years of Forde's life and found its way into the emotional core of the album. Watching her mother navigate the disease has been 'really sobering,' she says, but it has also illuminated the title's truth in a more profound way. 'Life for her is so different now, and it's so challenging,' Forde reflects. 'And yet, she said to me, life can still be sweet, you know? You walk the dog, you eat a delicious meal. She comes to my concerts and my shows.'

Forde's love for her mother comes through most directly on 'Molly,' the album's aching, heart-on-sleeve ballad. Written for the woman she calls her role model – 'a little firecracker, very charismatic, like, the belle of the ball' – the song rises into a wailing chorus that calls out her name with tenderness and grief. It's the record's most devastating moment, but also one of its purest expressions of love: A daughter singing toward the person who helped make her who she is.

Elsewhere, Life Can Still Be Sweet captures the lighter, stranger, funnier edges of growing up. 'No Space' turns the beautiful impossibility of cohabitation into a twangy, hook-filled release, written after a tense moment in a crowded Glassell Park house with roommates, girlfriends, dog hair, dishes in the sink, and rain outside with nowhere to escape. 'There's all these little stories in this record that I feel like encapsulate what it's like to be, like, a 20-something girl,' Forde says. 'Having roommates is one of them.'

'Do It All Over,' written with Marcel Camargo and Joey Dosik, may be her favorite track on the album – a breezy, playful groove born from a beach day and the desire to bottle that feeling of waves, friends, lovers, and sunlit nostalgia. The song's chemistry reflects the joy of its creation, bringing together Camargo's Brazilian guitar sensibility, Dosik's soulful craft, and Forde's own warmth into what she describes as 'just like a party.' 'My music is not gonna make you rage,' she says. 'It's not necessarily gonna make you cry, but it's just gonna make you feel really good. Like, you're sitting on the porch.'

On 'Fantasies,' out today, co-written and recorded with Kaveh Rastegar, Forde flirts with indie pop while letting her imagination run wild. Built around an acoustic bass percussion part Rastegar played by literally knocking on the instrument, the song captures the dizzy, looping feeling of wanting someone whose real-world presence cannot quite live up to the version in your head. 'This song is sort of about thinking about somebody more than they're thinking about you,' Forde says, 'and just running and running and running in your head with the fantasies.'

Forde turns inward on 'Wildflowers,' a simmering, jazz-kissed realization that something has reached its end. Originally written about the dissolution of a female friendship, the song has continued to shift meaning for Forde over time, opening itself to romantic endings and other moments when the truth suddenly becomes impossible to avoid. 'It's just that sort of feeling when you see clearly, all of a sudden,' she says. 'And it's tragic, and it's so sad, but it's just like, the truth is the truth.'

That willingness to let songs keep changing is part of what makes Life Can Still Be Sweet feel so alive. 'Life Can Still Be Sweet' means something different to Forde now than it did when she wrote it. 'Wildflowers' has grown beyond the friendship that inspired it. Vessel already feels like a diary entry from another self. For Forde, music becomes a series of snapshots – not fixed monuments, but living documents of who she was, who she is, and who she is becoming.

Right now, that becoming feels golden. Forde describes this chapter as her 'Roaring Twenties,' a sweet, scrappy era of development before everything gets bigger, heavier, and more complicated. 'I know I'm going to look back at this point in my life and recognize it as a really sweet era of development,' she says. 'It feels very feminine and girly, but it's sort of girl becomes woman in some ways. I'm learning the lessons that will cement me into womanhood.'

Life Can Still Be Sweet is full of those lessons: Love should lift you, not drag you uphill. Home is a place full of ghosts, stories, and characters. Friendship can break your heart. Desire can make fools of us. Family illness can change everything without taking away beauty. Life can be wild, strange, and hard, and still offer a walk with the dog, a delicious meal, a room full of music, a gorgeous day.

'I hope that listeners can see the world in that way,' Forde smiles. 'That even when the walls are caving in, everything's crashing down. You can still look up and realize that life can still be sweet.'

That is the gift of this record: Not false optimism, not denial, not sweetness as an escape from struggle, but sweetness as something that survives inside it. With Life Can Still Be Sweet, Lila Forde captures herself in motion – growing, grieving, laughing, loving, leading, and learning to trust the voice that has always been hers. It's a coming-of-age record for the moment when girl becomes woman, artist becomes architect, and the life you're building starts to feel undeniably your own.

Photo Credit: Robbie Jeffers

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