Friends of Liara Tsai are honoring her memory with a posthumous release.
The Last Angel is a “love letter” to Liara’s memory. It marks Liara’s debut album, consisting of tracks collected by friends and compiled by Chicago promotions outfit and label Banana Pudding. The Last Angel was released on June 21 2025, to mark “the one year anniversary of her last day here with us,” Angelia Word says.
The Last Angel, which includes a collaboration between Liara and her partner Nightlight (who also co-wrote the liner notes) is being released digitally at a price of your choosing. Pre-orders are also open for The Last Angel on cassette, with proceeds supporting Liara’s loved ones ahead of the trial for her murder in Minneapolis in September. Any additional funds left over will be donated to Twin Cities Trans Mutual Aid.
Liara was a member of Chicago and Berlin’s FemmeDecks, a collective platforming femme, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and genderqueer artists. But Liara had roots and connections all over the Midwest, from Iowa and Madison, WI to Chicago to Minneapolis, where she had moved just weeks before her death.
“Liara was one of my dearest friends, and we ran the collective FemmeDecks together until her passing,” Angelia says. “We released her first EP for a Banana Pudding x FemmeDecks collab in November 2022. It was Banana Pudding’s first release and official debut. It feels like a full circle moment, especially because I haven’t released anything on Banana Pudding in two years.”
Listening to The Last Angel is a complicated experience. There’s a real flair to the music, a personality that punches through. You can almost hear an artist as she finds her own voice in music, discovering what works in a track and the best way to express herself in a curiously intimate, genre-bending form of electronic music.
This should be joy and it is a joy. Tracks like the glistening electro of “Another Time Spell” or the muddy acid “Drench” (Liara’s collaboration with Nightlight) are gorgeous. But beyond the devastating impact of Liara’s death on family and friends, it’s a tragedy that The Last Angel might be all we know — that we won’t hear the next step she would have taken, and the one after that, the breakthrough and then the evolution that comes after it, of an artist both sure of themselves and sure that they really have something worth sharing with the world.
Multiple people contributed to the album, from tracking down Liara’s unreleased material to composing the cover art. “Everyone’s contribution has been a donation,” Angelia says. “I wanted the album to be filled with love for Liara, so everyone involved had a unique and special relationship with her.
“Everyone that participated — from the artist who designed the album cover to who wrote the liner notes — we all loved Liara a lot.”
The Last Angel is out now digitally with cassette pre-orders from Banana Pudding.
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