Grammy winning artist La Roux returns with the new album Trouble In Paradise which features nine tracks, each written and played by multi-instrumentalist Elly Jackson with Ian Sherwin on co-production. It is the follow-up to La Roux’s Grammy-winning eponymous debut album, which sold over two million copies worldwide and spawned over six million single sales.

When it came to making the new album, she took her time. ‘I wanted to create something more special, to take myself up a level,’ she says. ‘I also wanted to play pretty much everything as I did on the first record, but there was more complicated instrumentation this time, and it took me a while to get to grips with some of it.’

Trouble In Paradise is inspired by a particular tropical island she has visited since childhood, where she met a character very similar to the one portrayed in the laid-back, almost electro-calypso track ‘Tropical Chancer’. It’s a beautiful place, she says, but also very poor, a place that visitors fall in love with but the locals yearn to escape from.

‘On holiday, I always wonder what the beach is like out of season, when it’s empty, or what the people who are being so nice to you in a restaurant really think of the tourists who come and go. I’ve always been fascinated by what a place is like when you’ve left it, or that point after the party when there’s just balloons on the floor and there’s a weird emptiness in a place where such joy happened. And that became a huge inspiration for the record.’

Trouble In Paradise is all about the darkness lurking behind the most beautiful tune, the doubts in even the happiest of relationships, and trouble in all its forms, whether it’s the riots in Brixton, the part of south London she still calls home (Uptight Downtown); conflict between couples (Cruel Sexuality, Kiss And Not Tell); or cheeky stories like Sexoteque. ‘It’s about a bloke who can’t stop going to sex clubs, inspired by a club I saw when I was on tour in Montreal. I just thought the name was brilliant’.