There’s a timeline where Eliza McLamb is nearly finished with a law degree, and another where she’s climbed the corporate ladder in the solar paneling industry. In lieu of that, McLamb has fully committed herself to music, something that was once a hobby. At nineteen she gained TikTok virality from a replayable ditty about adolescent sexual confusion, and used that wit and self-awareness as a jumping off point for the career she’s built since. Now at twenty-four, McLamb’s sophomore album Good Story is her first release after stepping away as co-host of Binchtopia, the prolific and successful podcast she ran with Julia Hava. She doesn’t take the trial and error for granted, though. “There’s so many ways it could have gone down / Pretty much all of them easier than right now,” she sings in the chorus of closer “Getting Free.”
McLamb’s debut, Going Through It, raised more questions than it answered, displaying McLamb as a strong songwriter without much artistic identity. The record’s singles were endlessly memorable indie pop bangers: the sarcastic misandry of “Mythologize Me”; the tender, slow burning frustration of “Glitter”; the vivid self-deprecation of “Anything You Want.” The rest of the record fell short, partially due to unambitious production decisions from illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, who returns to the producer’s chair on Good Story. Tudzin undoubtedly knows how to make a record sound good. Her mixing and engineering credits date back a decade and span the original cast recording of Hamilton to Amen Dunes’ Freedom and boygenius’s Grammy-winning the record. It’s quite possible that that Grammy win has made Tudzin too comfortable, as her work since then has left something to be desired. It’s increasingly difficult to comprehend how the mind behind a raucous and captivating record like Let Me Do One More is the same one that made its less spectacular follow-up and heavily contributed to the already memory-holed trainwreck of Julien Baker and TORRES’ collaborative album from earlier this year.
That issue is marginally mitigated on Good Story, with McLamb upping her musical ambition in pockets of the record, but a handful of tracks feel like they could’ve used more time in the oven. The record’s first act harbors some of her best work to date, though, like the crunchy, metallic guitar tone on opener “Better Song,” which underscores McLamb introducing her complicated relationship with the past: “I have trouble with memories / Making them up and forgetting things / There’s a time so blank and dark / But I remember you.” The track’s sonic texture builds to a fever pitch, first with banjo and later wailing electric guitars, as she becomes more unapologetically honest about a love’s expired reciprocity. Lead single “Like the Boys” furthers the record’s hint of twang, with McLamb envious of the societal advantages her male friends are awarded. Pairing it with the agonies of dating men, it’s a prime example of how intricately self-aware McLamb’s lyrics can be. The record’s catchiest hook is equally thought-provoking: “I like the boys like the boys like to shoot their guns,” she sings atop driving drums and droning guitars. And the outro features a subtly gorgeous string arrangement, paired with the record’s first of several lyrical gut punches: “I’m the first mate on your big boat / Yelling hey, sailor / In my Abercrombie underwear / Flower in my hair / I thought I was one of them / But I was just standing there.”
The moments of musical risk on Good Story pay off more often than not. With its Chopin-esque opening, “Suffering” slaps the listener with sonic whiplash at the 45-second mark, with McLamb, in a staccato delivery surrounded by fuzzy electric guitars and one piano flourish, spills her most shameful secret: “I get off on suffering / It’s my favorite thing.” The track plays off a theme introduced in Going Through It’s “Modern Woman,” with its straightforward admission of feeling the need to suffer for the sake of making good art. “One day I might have nothing left to write,” she worries, “Just golden light.” And with the amount of lauded songwriters falling into that exact fate this year (Lucy Dacus and Taylor Swift, most pertinently), I can’t really blame her for that fear. Ultimately it’s up to her to challenge that self-fulfilling prophecy, but the hopefulness displayed on the shimmering closer “Getting Free” seems to place her on a solid track.
Good Story’s back half is much more of a mixed bag than its rousing first act. Penultimate track “Girls I Know” musically sounds so much like Adrianne Lenker’s “Sadness As A Gift” that I had to double check to see if I had it queued by accident on my first playthrough. Alternatively, the record’s most artful entry, the metaphor-heavy “Mausoleum,” occurs just minutes prior, featuring intentionally and intricately sporadic instrumentation that feels increasingly poignant on repeat listens. The two mid-album interludes, “Promise” and “Water Inside the Fence,” see McLamb squarely in and outside of her comfort zone, with the latter paying off much more than the former. Where “Promise” has a hard time justifying its minute-long existence on the record, “Water Inside the Fence” communicates a similar message both more effectively and in a more creative way musically. Clean, chorus-cranked guitars build to suffocate Eliza’s voice, ushering in a heady breakdown as McLamb repeats, “Just another lap.”
McLamb’s fears and confessions are potent and resonant, with fears of mortality becoming a thematic tool for her conveyance of love and passion. The authorial voice that she introduced on Going Through It last year comes one step closer to being fully formed. The lines “I thought about you dying for the first time today / That’s how I know I love you” and “All my friends want to kill themselves and I love them like a fool” open their respective songs (“Every Year” and “Getting Free”) with such subtlety and nonchalance that they feel like statements of innate reality. Eliza McLamb doesn’t know if she loves the reality she lives in, but Good Story proves she’s willing to ask why. [Royal Mountain Records]
