Lizzy McAlpine is an admitted overthinker, particularly when it comes to the concept of time and our inability to control it. “I spiral about that pretty much every night,” says the 24-year-old, who contemplates growth and reconciles with regret on her third album “Older,” out today (April 5). “Definitely on birthdays, I hate birthdays, I’m terrified of death. So yeah, I think about it all the time. It’s an ever-present thing in my life and I guess it just seeped into this record. It’s just always there. I think I allowed it to be seen a little more in this.”
Mortality is just one piece of the broader narrative of “Older,” a deeply visceral meditation on the fallout of a singular romantic relationship that McAlpine dissects over the course of the album. It’s a stark, confessional body of work that trims away the more experimental flourishes of 2022’s “Five Seconds Flat.” That project propelled her to new, mainstream heights on the back of single “Ceilings,” an inescapable TikTok hit whose sped-up version has nearly 700,000 uses on the platform.
For McAlpine, “Older” is more focused and centered than her prior work. On it, she juxtaposes her relationship’s unraveling against a coming-of-age story, trying to make sense of it all in real-time. It’s apparent on the horn-kissed “All Falls Down” (“22 was a panic attack, I can’t stop the time from moving / And I can never get it back”), and the sparse “Movie Star” (“Who am I, who am I to myself / What are you changing about me?”). She structures the album to trace the arc of her doomed love, and by the time she gets to “Broken Glass,” it all comes undone in the stretch to the record’s conclusion.
“It starts normal and then just devolves,” she explains. “It’s the reflection and acknowledgment of [the fact that] I also played a part in this relationship and this cycle and the toxicity. I wrote some of those songs post-cycle, after I was out of it, which I think gave me a lot of perspective and that’s why I was able to write some of those songs. It’s about atoning and owning up to what I did, and also acknowledging the hurt that he caused me. There are so many layers to this type of relationship… I tried my best to explain and write these songs in a way that would help explain the layers. For me, this explains our entire relationship.”
McAlpine, who’s discussing the album from her Los Angeles home, began writing “Older” during the sessions for “Five Seconds Flat.” It was in 2021, during lockdown, that she was penning songs that ended up on both records. She knew there was a distinction between some of the tracks she was actualizing. “I was trying to figure out what my sound was, and that was what came out of that period of experimentation,” she recalls. “And when I started writing for this album, I could immediately feel that it was different sounding. It just felt different. It felt a little bit more mature and grounded, a little more grounded, and I think I could just tell which songs were meant to be on this.”
She began recording “Older” with several producers in trial-and-error fashion and almost completed the album last August, but something didn’t sit right with the final product. That same month, she went to see indie singer-songwriter Ryan Beatty at The Ford in Los Angeles, enamored by the cohesion across his backing band and the common musical thread between them. That October, she regrouped with those players — Mason Stoops, Ryan Lerman, Jeremy Most and Tony Berg — and huddled for two weeks to revamp the compositions. They recorded live over several takes and picked the best ones, adding production and fleshing them out in post.
That of-the-moment spontaneity pulses through “Older,” lending it an air of intimacy, almost like you’re in the room while they’re performing. On the pre-chorus to the gauzy single “I Guess,” McAlpine sings in a hush, “Wish it was easy, I wish I knew / What I was doing, but I never do.” A voice in the room states, “Here we go,” and the song bursts into a full-blooded explosion; the chemistry in the session is palpable, almost like an epiphany.
McAlpine created the album in the wake of “Ceilings,” a wistful, building ballad that came with its trend of TikTokers running aimlessly (and emotionally performative) as the song played. She’s talked in the past about the complicated feelings she has about its ascent, and how one viral moment can demand artists to lean into moments in inauthentic ways. For her, it was a crash course in what not to do when trying to define your artistry.
“Honestly, it was cool and great, and I’m grateful because that allowed me to get to this point in my career,” she says. “At the same time, that shifted my views on what I really want to do with my career. I feel like having that moment of virality and doing all the things around that, that you should do if your song goes viral, it was kind of a wakeup call. I was like, I don’t think that this is something that I really care about that much or want to do. Playing the game around having a viral moment or doing things that will get you to being famous or whatever. I got a small taste of that and I didn’t like it, and I don’t like being perceived because I am a people pleaser and I just want to please everyone and that’s so impossible in doing what I do. I just realized that I just want to focus on the art. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
Even so, McAlpine is operating on a much broader scale in part thanks to “Ceilings,” with fresh wisdom to define this new era on her own terms. She just started rehearsals with her backing band (the same who contributed to the album) in anticipation of her biggest tour to date, logging multiple nights at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre. She never really interrogated how it would be to translate her most vulnerable, intimate experiences to growing crowds, but she’s starting to make peace with it.
“This album is different because it took so long to make and it truly was a labor of love. Thinking about it way more now, it’s kind of terrifying because I am scared that people won’t understand it, they won’t like it, they won’t get it,” she says. “That’s just a fear that’s been in me from the moment we started to make this album. Something is just different this time. I just think it’s because this album is so personal. It’s stripped and raw — not stripped in instrumentation, but I’m just putting out my entire soul for people to witness and I feel like before, I dressed it up with different things and production elements and this time it’s just there. It’s scary.”
