Shedding commercial concerns for a yearning to be her authentic self, Lizzy McAlpine’s new album ‘Older’ is an evolution that marks out an artist in pursuit of genuine self-expression.
Words: Liam Konemann.
It's morning in Hawaii, and Lizzy McAlpine is just easing into the day. We are two months out from the release of her third album, 'Older', and the music industry machine is whirring back to life. These are the early days of a new cycle of gigs, interviews and social media sprees with her at the centre.
Usually, she'd be bored of the songs by now. An album takes a long time to make, and inevitably by the time you've written and rewritten them, recorded and then re-recorded, you start to become detached. You get detached, you get bored. Or at least she has in the past. Not this time.
"I think it's a testament to how much the songs feel like me, because I didn't really get bored of them," Lizzy says. "I wasn't like, 'oh, suddenly these don't feel like me anymore', which is usually what happens, and especially what happened with 'Five Seconds Flat'.
On 'Older', an exploration of upheaval and personal growth set against the backdrop of a dysfunctional relationship, Lizzy looks back at the turbulence of her early 20s and charts a new path for artistic fulfilment. Turning away from some of the influences and techniques of her earlier work, she shares something altogether more authentic.
With each new album, Lizzy is moving closer to a sound that feels like her. In interviews ahead of the release of her second album 'Five Seconds Flat' at the age of 22, she reflected that her debut 'Give Me A Minute' - and, presumably, the 20-year-old who made it - now felt impossibly young. At 24, she's leaving the artist she was on album number two in the rearview as well.
While 'Give Me A Minute' resonated with fans and critics for its poetic lyrics and relatable themes, 'Five Seconds Flat' pushed Lizzy into the stratosphere. A sonic mish-mash of some of the biggest indie artists of the decade so far, the album made her an indie pop darling and social media superstar. At first, it seemed like a dream come true. She had made the kind of album that she thought people would like, and they did. And for a while there, Lizzy liked it too.
Two years on, she feels very differently.
"To me, it sounds like I was trying to make what other people thought was cool," she says. "Now that I look back on it I'm like, who is that person? Who was making that? It doesn't sound like me. It sounds like it was made to sound like what people thought was cool at the time."
If the intention was mass appeal, then 'Five Seconds Flat' hit its target. It isn't fair to say that Lizzy McAlpine got her start on TikTok, but it would be stupid to pretend it didn't make a difference. Her song 'Ceilings', initially an album track appearing halfway down the listing on 'Five Seconds Flat', went mega-viral on the platform at the start of 2023, almost a year after the album came out. A sped-up version of the song's final plot-twist verse was layered over literally hundreds of thousands of videos, replicating themselves seemingly endlessly. Lizzy's vocal - pitched up to the point that she sounds like a singing bluebird in a 2D Disney movie - soars over clips of young women in fairytale dresses running through the woods, or the rain or along the beach, like the climactic scene in a romance epic. About a year later, it's still her most streamed track on Spotify by a margin of several hundred thousand.
