At 26, Lindsey Jordan may be one of indie rock’s youngest veterans. She was still a teenager, ravenously trawling Tumblr for new music and traversing the Baltimore-DC DIY scene in her friend’s cars, when she started Snail Mail in 2015. Fresh out of high school, she recorded her 2018 debut ‘Lush’, which made her one of indie’s biggest new names. Almost every major publication raved about the record’s dreamy sound and raw songwriting (we were early to the party, naming her to the NME 100 of 2018), and she played a staggering amount of shows – according to Songkick, she was the hardest-touring artist in the industry that year. Still, she and her band spent the year getting kicked out of the clubs they were headlining. “We had to stand outside until we could play and then stand outside again [after],” she laughs.
Pandemic aside, she held on to the momentum when she released the synthy and brooding ‘Valentine’ in 2021, which NME called a “beautiful progression” in a five-star review. A little over four years on, she returns with ‘Ricochet’, a supremely catchy, band-driven, ’90s power-pop-inspired overhaul of her sound (Alex Bass and Ray Brown, her touring band since the early days of Snail Mail, back her on the record). In the time in between albums, she tried out some side quests – namely, her acting debut in the A24 horror I Saw The TV Glow, where she played a slicked-hair, leather jacket-clad Buffy type, on top of contributing a Smashing Pumpkins cover to the soundtrack. Apart from that, has she been able to catch a breather?
“No, no,” she says, shaking her head before NME even finishes the question. “We toured for most of it, maybe like three and a half of those years. And I was pretty much trying to write this record and working on it the entire time.”
On every record, Jordan says, it takes her a long time to get things how she wants them. This time, she deliberately worked slowly and methodically, nailing down every melody and instrumental part with a single-minded focus on catchiness. “Before I even got to the lyrics, I had already been perfecting the catchiness for so many years. Just years and years of being like, no, it’s not da-da-da, it’s da-da-da-da.”
Snail Mail wanted to make an album that sounded like the music she grew up on, the stuff she remembers hearing in her mum’s car during the mid-2000s. “Some of that stuff is actually my main inspiration,” she says, noting that she covered ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls way before it was back in fashion. “I love ‘Glycerine’ by Bush, I love Coldplay from a certain era, Michelle Branch.” Tracks like ‘Tractor Beam’ and ‘Ricochet’ have a string section backing up transcendent melodies, while the likes of ‘Dead End’ and ‘Nowhere’ do an electric-and-acoustic combo that’s incredibly ’90s. The violin-guided ‘Light On Our Feet’ is practically a prom ballad, and closing track ‘Reverie’ is a lighters-waving go-for-broke love song. “There were moments where I was like, ‘This doesn’t sound Christian rock enough, bring up the glockenspiel!’” Jordan laughs.
Two years ago, Jordan bought her first house. She sits there now at a work table, with a high sloping ceiling and wood-panelled walls in the background of her Zoom window. It’s in a quiet part of North Carolina that she had never been to before finding the house. “I was just looking for land and cheap property and interesting architecture, and I had the freedom to sort of do that anywhere in America.” Buying had been the goal since early in her career, after reading an interview with Kim Deal, who claims that buying a house with her first big Pixies paycheck was the best decision she ever made.
It was a move out of New York, where she’d been living since the ‘Lush’ cycle. She didn’t really know anyone here, and that was kind of a selling point – when she’s not on tour, she’s a homebody, and that often made her an outlier in New York. “A good amount of my stress was about dodging my friends,” she laughs. Now, she spends a lot of time with neighbours, cooking out or going round for family dinners. She’s also got into cooking and all kinds of arts and crafts: pottery, modelling kits, clothes-dyeing, jewellery-making. “I have, like, every hobby now,” she says.
The solitude it gave her was what she needed to write the lyrics for ‘Ricochet’. “For like a year straight, I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t go home for Christmas. I just kind of locked myself away.” She had known since finishing ‘Valentine’ – a breakup and yearning-heavy record, as ‘Lush’ had also been – that she wanted a change. She started thinking about the poets that move her: Frank O’Hara, David Berman, Adrienne Rich, some Emily Dickinson. “I wanted to see what other kind of writer I could be,” she says. “Especially because I really struggle to feel bad for myself in the same way that I was able to as a teenager. It’s really hard for me to bathe in [self-pity] in the way that I used to.”
Another influence, in a more roundabout way, was the 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York. Jordan has OCD, and the movie, a surrealist but deeply depressing view of a man entering old age, sent her into a years-long obsession with mortality. “The day I got my dog, I was just [thinking that] I don’t think I have the strength to sit with her while she gets euthanised,” she muses. “Or I’d literally be in the middle of a song onstage, and I’d be [thinking] one day I’m not gonna like how I look in the mirror, and then I don’t think I wanna be onstage.”
“By the time I was ready to sit down and write the lyrics, I just wanted to make something expressive out of what felt like a waste of so many years of my youth,” Jordan explains. On the chorus of the electronics-tinged ‘My Maker’, she sings: “Another year gone by / What if nothing matters? / Waiting round to die / To see what happens after”. “Damn, the sky’s so clear tonight / Like a hot bath waiting on the other side / Just begging me to slip beneath”, goes the bridge of ‘Nowhere’, a song influenced by the gentle take on mortality in Laura Gilpin’s poem ‘The Two-Headed Calf’.
Elsewhere, particularly on the back half of the record, there are songs that feel informed by a weariness with the music industry. “The suit is just another grifter with a card”, she sings on ‘Butterfly’. “I won’t let them pluck your wings, suck the life from everything”. ‘Reverie’ is a love song about someone who feels like a refuge from the craziness and the social climbing. “Being in this for this long, I’ve just seen some crazy bullshit. I’ve met some crazy motherfuckers, I’ve seen some disturbing stuff go down, and I see it happen to new people all the time,” Jordan says. “A lot of the record for me is like, trying actively to keep myself human and unjaded. It’s a thing that I have to manually do.”
“For me, [what helps] is like, literally petting an animal,” she continues. “Shit where I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m fucking human; there’s blood, there’s veins.’” Throughout the interview, she keeps getting up to let her barking dog in and out of the house; she shows us the pottery she’s been working on, ashtrays which will be birthday gifts for friends. It seems like a slow, human, adult life. The kind where Snail Mail can take her time.
Snail Mail’s ‘Ricochet’ is out March 27 via Matador. She tours the UK and EU in June.