Lucille Croft Introduces Patient X

Meet Patient X. Created and personified by the extraterrestrial Lucille Croft. The Aussie producer boldly presents her posthuman form on her first-ever EP, featuring five dangerously free tracks. More than just an EP, Patient X is Lucille’s biggest project to date and the first time she’s developed and introduced a persona of her own design. 

“Patient X is a fictional character that I created but I think in a more personal sense, it’s also a part of me,” Lucille says. “It’s a personality that’s just living inside of me that I’m currently getting to act out.” She explains how she created Patient X based on her love for all things out of this world, science fiction, and gaming — and it’s the first of many concepts to come, it seems. “With my music, it’s never just a song,” she says. “Every song has a detailed storyline.”

Lucille says she began to conceptualize Patient X over a year and a half ago, citing a dream as the source of inspiration. “I have very weird, vivid dreams — I think it’s because I watch a lot of really twisted movies before I go to sleep and I think that has an effect on it,” she laughs. 

“I was feeling very emotional, angry, and confused about my career while I was building out the storyline, and I just wasn’t sure that Patient X existed yet. I was thinking to myself, who is the character behind this?”

In her dream, Lucille says she was in a first-person shooter video game similar to Doom, where she saw herself running through each level, shooting “bad guys,” and looking for ammo through a vivid lens. 

“Interestingly, a song from the record was playing as the soundtrack,” she shares. That track happens to be the first song off Patient X, “Post Human.” “I woke up when I got to the end of the level and I was like, oh my god, that’s the kind of character I was thinking of!”

The next morning, Lucille says she was lying down on the floor in a dark room listening to her demos. “You know when you see shapes and colors when you close your eyes? Well, that happens to me a lot,” she explains. “I was listening to the songs, and a bluish X appeared in my mind, and in that moment, I opened my eyes, and I thought… Patient X.”

Lucille prepared to make her dream a reality with a concept that quite literally came from within. She had already begun acting as creative director for her self-released music, setting the stage for Patient X and beyond. 

“I started to really roll out my true identity and creative ethos when I started moving away from working with A&Rs and teams who were telling me how I needed to do things and that my ideas were too crazy,” she says.

“‘Control’ was the first one where I built out a character that’s relatively along the lines of Patient X — you know, where I’m talking about controlling your mind and shot the artwork to make it look like a weird, futuristic sci-fi movie poster. ‘Resonate’ was a bit of a weird follow-up in the sense of an interstellar concept where time is a construct.” She says none of those concepts were quite as strong as Patient X, her first body of work as Lucille Croft. “Each song on my EP is like a different mission.”

Taking matters into her own hands, Lucille pulled all the strings to bring Patient X to life. “I needed to go pretty crazy with this EP,” she says. “There weren’t any crazy budgets and I did all the creative direction myself. A lot of how I pulled things together was reaching out to friends and creatives and asking if they could help me bring this vision to life. I’m very proud of the way things turned out with Patient X… a lot of it was very DIY and I’m excited now to use it as a proof of concept.” 

Lucille didn’t just invent the character, she took on the role of creative director, stylist, and make-up artist. “I’m really loving more outrageous things at the moment, like the really weird graphic eyeliner looks,” she says, citing artists like Björk and Grimes as examples of inspiration. “The weirder and weirder it gets, I’m all for it.”

If you’ve ever wondered which video game could be scored by Lucille Croft, she’s thought about a few ideas herself. “Part of me wants to say something like Dark Souls because it’s such an incredibly hard game. I guess they’re a little bit more medieval though, so I don’t know how heavy, electronic cyberpunk music would go with that. Maybe the Doom games — I’m such a big fan of Doom and grew up with two older brothers who had played it a lot. Maybe even Resident Evil… the movies and the games have been such a big part of my like brand and ethos.” After passionate deliberation, Lucille chooses Dark Souls. “Even though it’s more of a medieval game, I’m going to score futuristic electronic music and they can just have swords, shields, and spears and fight monsters to techno.”

Now that Patient X is out, and the sky’s the limit, Lucille is gearing up to play her first shows in the United States and take her unique concepts to the stage. As parting words, Lucille has a message for other women in the scene who want to follow in her footsteps. “Absolutely go for it. Don’t give it a second thought. You need to be prepared to fight, but it’s 100 percent worth it and there’s so many incredible, supportive women in music that I work with and that I’m friends with. You’re gonna have to fight for your place, but it’s worth it.”