New release: Snail Mail
One of the most exciting emerging artists of the year Snail Mail has released her debut album 'Lush', the follow-up to critically acclaimed EP 'Habit'. Featuring singles 'Pristine' and 'Heat Wave', the Baltimore local’s striking debut album is emotionally wise, musically clear, and encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock.
Available now via Matador/Remote Control and published by Mattitude/ Beggars Publishing and sub-published by Gaga Music
Pitchfork says this of the album:-
"Snail Mail’s striking debut album is emotionally wise, musically clear, and encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock.
With Lush, Jordan earns her place as a leader in the next generation of indie rock, the ones who are keeping the genre’s honorable ideals alight while continuing to expand its purview beyond straight white dudes. She was born in June 1999, the same month Napster started, and by the time she was in her early teens, the once-sturdy walls that separated mainstream and underground music were all but rubble. So while Jordan is indebted to the ethos of ’90s indie rock, she bends it to her will and her moment. There are echoes of early Liz Phair in Lush’s stark guitars and its tightrope walk between despair and enlightenment, but there are also flashes of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg at his most wrung-out, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams crinkled emo soulfulness, and Fiona Apple’s ferocity, and Taylor Swift’s savvy heartache, and the solemn quietude of Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jordan doesn’t make a big show of her eclecticism on the album—on its face, it is a collection of slow and mid-tempo guitar rock songs—but there are details that separate it from the tried-and-true indie of yesteryear, that make it feel born into her era.
For one, Lush lives up to its name; “I never wanted to make a lo-fi record,” Jordan recently said. All 10 songs go down clean, every note is heard, every part delivered with both verve and poise. As a classically trained guitarist who began playing at age 5, Jordan colors many tracks with layers of pleasingly sour chords kissed by reverb, her clean tone in concert with her emotional transparency. Her guitar work helps Lush achieve a sidewinding spell that invites obsessive listening. It also opens up plenty of space for her bandmates to add unfussy accompaniment and, most importantly, for her voice to ring out unencumbered. Whereas her vocals were buried on 2016’s Habit EP, they are gloriously exposed on Lush, and we really hear Lindsey Jordan for the first time.
As a singer, she embodies the chaotic changes that teenagers quickly cycle through in a given month, day, minute. She is bored. She is defeated. She is bratty. She is jubilant. She is blunt. She is elliptical. These shifts occur from song to song, but also from line to line, or even word to word. On “Pristine,” she reels off lines of devoted romantic poetry before immediately dismissing them with a tossed-off “anyways,” pumping up and deflating her own crush in a single breath. Throughout the record, each line is given its own story. Every vocal feels deeply considered and felt, yet nothing is over-rehearsed. She knows precisely when to dial in and when to dial back, when to fully commit to her longing and when to step back and shake her head at it."
Listen: 'Lush'
