The Line From Thriller to Free The Monster, the Horror-Movie R&B of L/C

A Dark Pop and R&B Single About Freeing the Self Hidden Behind the Perfect Child

Free The Monster lays a danceable pop and R&B groove over a tense beat inspired by Tenet. Jazz harmony sits on top, and a live guitar takes the bridge. L/C released it on 16 October 2026. She is a Chinese pop and R&B artist, producer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, United States. The single joins a long line of R&B records that make room for a monster.

L/C’s single is in the playlist below, while every piece we have published about her lives on the L/C profile. Free The Monster reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play, then read on for the horror films and R&B records it is descended from.

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Thriller, Redbone and the Tenet Score Show How Long Horror and R&B Have Shared a Room

That pairing of fright and groove is older than it sounds. In 1983 Michael Jackson’s Thriller reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also the seventh single from the album to make the top ten. Rod Temperton wrote it, and at first it was a song called Starlight. Quincy Jones produced it, and the horror actor Vincent Price recorded a spoken-word poem for it in two takes. Then John Landis directed a video in which Jackson dances with a horde of zombies.

The link has run the other way as well. Childish Gambino released Redbone on 17 November 2016. He produced it with the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson. They built it on I’d Rather Be with You by Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Jordan Peele then used it in the opening scene of Get Out. The 2017 horror film later won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Meanwhile, the song itself won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

Göransson is the bridge to this record. He went on to score Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Its soundtrack came out on 2 September 2020 and earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score. It also carried The Plan, a Travis Scott song he produced with WondaGurl. Tenet is the film behind the beat of Free The Monster. So a single L/C began alone links back to a producer who tied horror cinema to R&B.

That is the wave this single joins: R&B that borrows a film’s tension and still keeps people dancing.

Where L/C Fits, a Pop and R&B Artist Setting Free The Monster That Perfectionism Hid

L/C comes to that lineage from an unusual direction, as a Chinese artist making R&B in the United States. She came to music after a career in architecture. Her taste runs from the high-energy teen pop of the early 2000s to neo-soul, R&B and jazz. She also makes comedy, which suits a song she frames as cute as well as spooky.

In her case the monster is personal. Free The Monster grew out of years of people-pleasing and the pressure to be the perfect child. The monster is the part of her that pressure kept locked away. Letting it out is the point. As a result, imperfection becomes something worth keeping, and self-acceptance sits beside loneliness and self-belief among the themes she writes about.

The music plays the same game of light and dark. It blends pop, R&B, electronic beats and jazz harmony. The mood sits between cute and spooky, closer to a Halloween party than a slasher film.

A Bedroom Beat Becomes a Finished Single, With an R&B Producer and a Live Guitar

It started small. L/C produced the first version herself, in a bedroom, around that Tenet-inspired beat. Then she took it further with Mark Evich, an R&B producer who works from his own studio in Burbank.

Evich’s own music blends modern R&B with the legacy of the Soulquarians. That was the rotating collective of Questlove, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, J Dilla and others. Their sessions at Electric Lady Studios in New York produced several well-received neo-soul and hip-hop albums around 2000. That matters here, because neo-soul is part of L/C’s own taste. On Free The Monster he expanded the sound design and the instrumentation while keeping the tension of the first beat.

Then the bridge opens up. Yanming Lu recorded a live electric guitar part for it. That gives the electronic track something raw to stand on beside the vocals.

L/C, credited as Chen Lian, wrote the words and wrote the music with Evich. She sings the lead and the background vocals, and she co-produced the track with Evich and Yarku Yu.

Two Acts Who Share the Dark Pop and R&B Shelf With L/C and Free The Monster

Today, XG is the nearest reference for listeners who like their R&B to cross borders. The Japanese vocal group trained for about five years between Japan and South Korea. It debuted on 18 March 2022 with Tippy Toes and works between R&B and hip-hop. Its EP Awe came out on 8 November 2024 alongside the single Howling. The EP also uses a wolf-pack motif, and its title sounds like a wolf’s howl. L/C works on a smaller scale. Still, she shares the instinct to put a creature at the centre of a pop record.

Billie Eilish wrote one of dark pop’s best-known monster songs. On Bury a Friend, released on 30 January 2019, she sings as the monster under someone’s bed. She wrote it with her brother Finneas O’Connell, who produced it. They made the album it came from, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, in his small bedroom studio, too. Free The Monster turns that idea around. It also started in a bedroom, but its monster lives inside the singer.

Thriller made the monster a dance partner in 1983. Four decades on, L/C makes it the part of herself she no longer hides. She asks us to dance with it.

BlackSounds.News curator team: “A song about the pressure to be perfect, dressed as a Halloween dance record, is a clever disguise. Wait for the bridge, where the live guitar breaks the spell.”

Free The Monster is also on Apple Music. Follow L/C on Spotify and Instagram, and hear more of her music on SoundCloud.

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