Lindsey Jordan likes her peace and quiet. When she was in her early twenties, living in New York City’s chaotic East Village as she pursued music took a toll on her psyche. So Jordan, who’s now twenty-six and records under the name Snail Mail, moved south to North Carolina, a state she fell in love with on tour. “I was standing onstage in Winston-Salem, thinking it was so rad,” she recalls. “Then I went kayaking the next day.” She bought a house on some land outside Greensboro, and as we talk over video chat, it’s clear she maintains that new homeowner exuberance. “Check this out,” she says, swinging her laptop camera to show off vaulted ceilings that give off a 1980s mountain lodge vibe. Jordan revels in the privacy—playing with her dog, Pip, an American Eskimo, and tackling home improvement projects. But she’s enjoyed getting to know her welcoming neighbors. “It’s the Southern thing to do,” after all.
Jordan’s comfort in her own skin was apparent from an early age. She grew up outside of Baltimore, started playing guitar at five, and by twelve was writing songs and beginning to book her own gigs at local coffee shops. In 2018, she released her debut, Lush, which drew praise for her evocative lyrics about tortured crushes and bad breakups, matched with a sizzling indie guitar sound. Her 2021 follow-up, Valentine, continued in the same vein but added a gut punch of weariness and turmoil born of spending months on the road.
Now a little older and wiser, Jordan turns her gaze toward larger, existential questions on Snail Mail’s exquisite third album, Ricochet, fleshing out her sound with strings and horns while maintaining her gift for melody. “Not everything in life has to be as dramatic,” she says. “When I’m into something hard now, I’m not always bathing in it, so I feel like it was just a matter of time until I didn’t want to be confessional anymore.” She took a different approach to her songwriting, this time writing instrumentals first and then focusing on lyrics. “Not having to flounder for hooks or ideas melodically was great for me,” she says, “because lyrics are so stressful to begin with.”
The process resulted in an album with hooks that feel both immediate and earned. The jangly opener “Tractor Beam” sees Jordan ultimately transcending a relationship’s demise. Lead single “Dead End” showcases Ricochet’s nineties alt-rock touchstones—Jordan and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch (of the Brooklyn band Momma) crafted an inspiration playlist heavy on Marcy Playground, Oasis, and Radiohead. Those influences emerge throughout in the album’s sun-drenched guitars and embrace of earnest subjects without irony. “Reverie,” the intimate finale, is Jordan’s favorite song on the record. Unlike the earlier track “My Maker,” where she maintains ambiguity about big universal questions, “Reverie” finds her relishing a newfound sense of confidence. “This is my rodeo,” she says. “This is my album.”
The day after our interview, Jordan is flying to New York to shoot a video, and she’s a little freaked out by the travel. “It’s really burned my nervous system,” she says. “But I know I have to do it for work.” Life is calmer when her girlfriend of three years, Etta Friedman (Momma’s lead singer), visits. Nothing makes Jordan happier than when the two are puttering around the house doing their own thing—Friedman is a painter, while Jordan has taken up sculpture—before reconvening at night over beers and Scrabble. “It’s taken a lot to figure out, but being in the quiet, back to the suburbs, has been helping me write my best music,” she says. “I have what I need now.”
More New Music: Country’s New Rising Star
With her unfiltered songwriting, honest storytelling, and gift for melody, Ella Langley has the chops of Miranda Lambert and a next-gen Loretta Lynn. On her sophomore album, Dandelion, the twenty-six-year-old Alabama native delivers the goods. The smash hits “Choosin’ Texas” and the title track set the table for a tour de force of songs filled with boozy late-night calls, lonely laments, and shattered relationships, each a bigger earworm than the last. (Fittingly, Lambert co-produced the album and cowrote a couple of tunes.) Langley is a country superstar in the making, and with Dandelion, she has the songs to back it up.
