LAVA LA RUE tops Antidote this week with “Humanity,” the second single from their upcoming debut record STARFACE, due on July 12. “I wrote it really quickly,” they tell Apple Music. “It kind of just poured out a storyline of a real friendship that I lost. The lyrics are obviously very narrative-based.” The song is about a former classmate who the London singer/producer lost to addiction (“She got a new stare/Class A glaze, gave up on any help”), and finds them declaring their love for her (“I know you are scared/I’ll still love you radically”). “It’s about finding the humanity in things,” they add. “You can lose someone or disagree with how [they] want to live [their] life, but you can still have a lot of love for that person. There can also be a big sense of gratitude—of ‘I’m really happy I got to know you.’” With do-do-dos in the chorus and mournful yet comforting horns at its end, “Humanity” is colored by optimism and levity—which is exactly what LAVA wanted to convey. “For every dark situation there is a light, and that is the balance of the world,” they say. “There are people dying and people being born at the same time. I think that when things seem really dark, one thing that I have seen is such a resilience of people being like, ‘No, I want things to be better, and I still have that hope and I’m not going to give up on humanity, and I’m not going to give up on humankind.’ I think it’s just lame to be cynical and just be like, ‘Well, everything’s f****d.’ I think that’s lazy and just not true.” It was the song from STARFACE, they add, that summed up “how they’ve been feeling about the state of the world at the moment,” and they’re excited for us all to hear the album’s other tracks. “I’m really debuting and legitimizing myself,” they say of releasing the record later this year. “I remember being 14 and sitting and listening to a full record and just feeling fulfilled with the music. I always knew that I wanted my first album to have that. I wanted it to feel like a full home-cooked meal with loads of different elements to it.” Like all the artists featured, Antidote is always evolving—so keep checking back, and if you hear something you like, add it to your library.