Lizzy McAlpine Sets Herself Free

“You are the light in the painting.” Poised at a microphone in an L.A. rehearsal space, Lizzy McAlpine is singing the first line of the first single from her new album, Angel, when she abruptly pauses: “What is that noise?” Through her headphones, she can hear the faint rubbing of her leather guitar strap against the wood of her prized 1953 Gibson, Edith. It’s enough to interfere with the pristine hush of her vocals on “The Light in the Painting,” and she cannot abide it. Her guitarist and co-producer Mason Stoops steps in to swap out the strap, singing, “You are the squeakiest of leathers.” Everyone laughs. They begin again.

“I am never satisfied,” McAlpine, 26, had explained earlier when I arrived to find her curled up in a chair, wearing an oatmeal-colored tee and jeans, and eating a banana. “I hold myself to really high standards.” On this scorching-hot August day, she is sitting in a compound in L.A.’s artsy Frogtown neighborhood to rehearse for the first live shows in support of her fourth album (out Sept. 18). She and her band –– Stoops, pianist and co-producer Taylor Mackall, and bassist-engineer Omar Akrouche –– have been here every day this week, along with McAlpine’s boyfriend, Kane Ritchotte, who’s playing drums for the early shows.

In the official music video for “The Light in the Painting,” Ritchotte is the handsome, Keanu-esque man over whose knee McAlpine folds her arms to sing its lovelorn lyrics. The song is about him, right? McAlpine laughs. “No, we’ve only been dating for six months,” she says, noting that all 14 tracks on Angel were finished before they met. In fact, she and her bandmates just so happened to extend the recording of Angel by one extra day, allowing Stoops and Mackall to ask their friend Ritchotte (drummer-producer for the band SRCHR) to join them on percussion because McAlpine thought he was “cute.” “We found something for him to do,” she says, still smiling. “Kane asked me out to dinner that night.” Today, he drums behind a plywood-and-Plexiglas partition decorated with a poster of her looking languorous and a pennant she made for him that reads KANGEL.

“Her songs feel so vulnerable and so relatable,” Lola Tung says. “Her music is truly magic.”

It’s a small miracle that anybody is here playing these songs at all. After her previous album, 2024’s Older, which cemented her brand of unhurried, contemplative folk-pop, McAlpine wasn’t sure she wanted to make music anymore. “I was so burnt-out,” she says. Nonetheless her label, RCA, was expecting another album, and she had a set of songs written largely under the influence of Joni Mitchell, particularly Blue and Hejira, that couldn’t go to waste. In January 2025, she gathered the band to start recording in Stoops’ recently purchased Altadena studio. As the group began working on the ambient, ’70s-style “Anybody’s Fool,” heavy winds started picking up and rattling the garage door. “Lizzy’s already super sensitive and scared that something’s going to kill her five times a day,” Stoops, 35, says with a wry smile. (She is at this very moment worried that she might be getting sick.) But he tried to coax her into embracing the staticky effect anyway. Their friction erupted into a full-on fight.

“We were not really listening to each other,” McAlpine says. (Mackall, 30, stayed out of it, invoking advice he learned in private school: “I was in mediation mode. Before you speak, you ask: ‘Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?’”) Later that day, those winds helped spread the flames of the massively destructive Eaton fire, wrecking the studio. The last thing Stoops was able to rescue before evacuating was the tape of that charged recording.

“It took five minutes, which in fire time is too much,” he says, as McAlpine pulls up footage on her phone from the session, which will be used for the song’s lyric video. “Anybody’s Fool” has remained unchanged since, and if you listen closely to the chorus, you can hear the wind. (“We need to get Kane a mini garage door that he can whack onstage,” Stoops says playfully.)

A few weeks after the fire, McAlpine departed L.A., where she lives, for New York to star in the Broadway musical Floyd Collins, playing the sister of the titular cave explorer whose entrapment and eventual death in 1925 created a media frenzy. Stoops assumed both the album and their future as musical partners were in limbo. Then McAlpine started sharing songs with him, one of which she played for him in person, featuring the lyric “I still have things to work on/That will never end/But I can’t do it alone.” It was titled “Mason’s Song.” They both cried. “Mason and I have a brother-sister relationship,” McAlpine says, her eyes again brimming. “I love him so much.”

“Songs just flow out of me. If it’s an arduous process, that usually means that it’s not good enough.”

McAlpine needed that time on Broadway, she says, to “get my light back.” She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia with her parents and younger sibling, Emory, and she credits playing Penny in a high school production of Hairspray and Eurydice in Sarah Ruhl’s play of the same name with helping to overcome her shyness. During the Broadway stint, McAlpine lived for four months “like a monk,” she says, leaving her apartment only to walk to and from the theater. But she never stopped writing music, penning “Soldier of the Road,” a gorgeous swirling eddy of a song featuring Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes, in her dressing room between rehearsals.

McAlpine is wildly prolific. Stoops jokes that in the time it takes him to eat “some horrible ham and cheese sandwich,” she’ll have written a new song like “Our Strange Ways,” a seven-minute crooner featuring a hidden outro. “They just flow out of me,” she says, adding that she can only write about her real life. “If it’s an arduous process, that usually means that it’s not good enough.”

Her fans, who connect deeply with her confessional style, include Lola Tung, actor and star of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which itself is coveted for capturing the exquisite pain of young love. “Her songs feel so vulnerable and so relatable,” Tung says via email, adding that she has had McAlpine’s latest single, “Ugly Things,” on repeat since its release a few weeks ago. “I love her [2021] EP When the World Stopped Moving. ‘Angelina’ is one of my favorite songs ever. It came out in my second semester of college, and I remember listening to it and sobbing in my apartment. Her music is truly magic.”

In her relatively short career, McAlpine has also developed a knack for going viral. Even before the release of her debut album, Give Me a Minute, in 2020, McAlpine earned a TikTok following when she shared her clever half-finished song “You Ruined the 1975,” which, much to some fans’ chagrin, would never appear on an album. “I wish I had never posted it,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s not a good song.” In 2023, “Ceilings,” from her sophomore album, Five Seconds Flat, launched a TikTok trend of women in flowy dresses running across woodlands, snow, and beaches to sped-up versions of the song. More recently, “Spring Into Summer,” from the deluxe edition of her third album, Older (and Wiser), prompted wistful social media montages and clips of friends jumping into water.

“If I’m jealous of anything, it’s how certain she is, how uninhibited she is, as a writer,” says Ritchotte, 34. When the band breaks for lunch, McAlpine throws her arms around him for a kiss, but she is out of earshot as he continues: “She can sit down with an instrument and just write and write. She doesn’t fall into common traps like overthinking or feeling insecure, wondering if the last song she wrote was the last time she’ll write a good song.”

“I still see people being like, ‘This song is disgusting.’ Y’all are telling me that you’ve never had these thoughts. Seriously? Are you kidding me?”

It follows that, more than anything, McAlpine hates feeling boxed in. So when it came time to record Older, she felt the initial sessions were trying too hard to recapture the bigger pop sound of Five Seconds Flat. “When I was touring with Five Seconds Flat, I was walking around the stage and going ‘woooo!’” she says, and mimes pumping her arm in the air. “It didn’t feel correct. Those songs are great, but that’s not really who I am anymore.” With a tour for Older already booked, she scrapped the recordings, hired her current band, and rerecorded the entire album in two weeks, which she admits was an “insane” thing to do. “I wouldn’t say making those decisions is hard. It’s just not fun,” she says, pulling her long brown hair back and holding it in a ponytail. “That’s kind of how I live my life. If I need to make a hard decision to pivot, then I will, because it needs to happen.”

Many of McAlpine’s songs are about messy relationships befitting someone her age. Older was a crucible of an album devoted entirely to an ex with a drinking problem. “It was sad,” says McAlpine, who doesn’t drink. Also, she’s done writing songs about that guy: “I left that one in the past. It’s not like bad blood or anything. He texts me sometimes about music because he’s also a musician. I don’t really respond.”

Another song from Older (and Wiser), the erotic “Pushing It Down and Praying,” scandalized some listeners with the line “I’m in bed, layin’ down, naked/You’re inside of me.” “I still see people being like, ‘This song is disgusting,’” she says, and shrugs. “Y’all are telling me that you’ve never had these thoughts. Seriously? Are you kidding me?”

On Angel, several tracks focus on dissolving a relationship and the ensuing freedom, including the soaring “Peach,” which McAlpine wrote two weeks fresh from a breakup when she realized she could simply eat the fruit before dinner. The problem, she says, is that she craves routine so deeply that she sometimes forgets that “I can literally do whatever I want, whenever I want.” An ideal day for her? Staying at home, reading horror novels (currently: C.J. Leede’s Headlights), playing mystery video games (like Return of the Obra Dinn), assembling Legos (which are threatening to overtake an entire room in her house), and, hopefully sooner than later, cuddling a cat. “I have free will,” she says, with a trace of awe.

As on her previous albums, Alpine reserved the 13th track on Angel for her late father, who died unexpectedly on March 13 of 2020, just as the world shut down for COVID. At the time McAlpine was a junior at the Berklee College of Music (she’d soon drop out). “The Crowd” is about regretting all the things she never got to know about her dad. When she sits down to play it at the piano, one of her touring musicians, Vanessa Wheeler, slips me a note that reads, This makes me cry every time. “I was 20, so I was still very like, ‘It’s all about me, me, me,’” McAlpine tells me of her father’s passing. “I’m in this phase of my life where I’m seeing my parents as actual people, but I can’t talk to my dad about anything now.”

The rehearsal is winding down. The band departs for a London show in a few days, and from there to New York and back to Los Angeles. McAlpine is still figuring out her relationship with performing live. Will she sit, or will she stand? “I don’t really know how I exist onstage yet,” she admits. For now, she’s going to go home and do nothing. After all, she can do whatever she wants.

Top image credit: Eckhaus Latta clothing; Araks bra; Universal Studios Costume vintage belt.