Lizzy McAlpine Grows Older (and Wiser)

Lizzy McAlpine’s third album, Older, is straightforwardly a breakup record. It examines the intimacy of watching – and making – a relationship fall apart with another person, trying again and reaching the same conclusions. It’s the first of McAlpine’s albums that I have found myself really loving. Older is elegant and confessional, full of warm live instrumentals and sweeping harmonies. It’s equal parts sparse and lush but never feels hollow or crowded. The five deluxe tracks on Older (and Wiser), released last Friday, expand on Older’s themes and storyline – grief, entanglement, knowing better but so badly wanting someone to work out anyway – but step away from its light jazz influences. It keeps, most importantly, its lack of conceit. These songs aren’t doing anything – McAlpine’s pedal steel isn’t Pink Floyd pedal steel or James Taylor pedal steel – and they stay sincere, smart, and vulnerable for it.

On Wiser, McAlpine is at her best as a composite storyteller – when no one element of the song shines overwhelmingly bright on its own, but melds into the whole. This delicate balance is what makes her more direct lyrics most effective. Lines that might seem sloppy from a lesser artist work because of how plain they are: “When I close my eyes, you replace him / Wearing no disguise, you erase him,” she sings on the standout lead single “Pushing It Down and Praying.” There’s nothing ornate or hyperspecific here to prop up the sentiment, only the moment she recounts, the ache in her voice, and the introduction of a watery vibraphone following the melody. It’s a moment of real beauty. There isn’t any one lyric that stands out from Wiser as much as little moments like this, when everything in McAlpine’s delivery and her words and the production gel together perfectly. It isn’t that she says, in the easy-listening singalong “Spring into Summer” that she’s “always, forever / running back to you.” It’s that she proclaims it, closing the album with a more buoyant sound, hard earned acceptance without severance. 

Profiling McAlpine for The New Yorker earlier this year, Amanda Petrusich placed her music, particularly five seconds flat from 2022, somewhere between Olivia Rodrigo and Phoebe Bridgers. There’s a feeling of tightness and correctness in McAlpine’s production and in her suede-smooth vocals that has always put her closer to the former than the latter. But there’s a moment on “Method Acting (Demo)” when McAlpine’s voice catches and goes ragged, like she’s running out of breath, until it gives out into a guitar break that’s more percussive than anything else. It’s the first of a few moments of grit on Wiser – the rootsy guitar hook in the back half of “Pushing It Down and Praying;” the fatalistic, descending refrain that “none of it matters” on “Force of Nature” – that grounds the darker songs and keeps them from feeling too slick. The lack of it is palpable in “Soccer Practice,” a tender ballad that feels like a sibling to “weird” from five seconds flat. McAlpine laments a future of domestic bliss that couldn’t be, her voice small, her production muted. But it lacks the immediacy of the question on “Like It Tends To Do,” from the Older’s standard tracklist, which has the same sparse swell. While by no means a misstep, there’s an evenness to “Soccer Practice” that keeps it from aching the way that it should.  

Tight and plainspoken, Older (and Wiser) avoids the pitfalls of McAlpine’s genre and of deluxe tracks – wandering off course of the album or, alternately, doubling down on a tortured motif – and both suits and completes the story of Older. At their best, the songs on Wiser feel like a postscript, recounting the time after the breakup with clear eyes and the knowledge that, despite the pain and rawness gained, she and her ex are both better off for having grown up and apart.