Maybe You’ve Heard Eliza McLamb. But You Don’t Know Her

I
feel like a modern woman,” Eliza McLamb sings over a bursting guitar riff. “I get up late, I’m always saying/‘Man, I gotta hit the DMV’/Always bills I’m paying.” 

McLamb’s debut album, Going Through It, has been one of this year’s best-kept secrets since its release this past January. “Modern Woman” is a highlight on the album. But seven months later, the lyrics on that song hit a little different: McLamb has sold her car and moved cross-country from Los Angeles to New York. Bills? Always. Trips to the DMV? No longer necessary.

“I miss it, but I think I miss the symbol of it more,” McLamb says of her vehicle. “It was my first big-girl purchase. But ultimately it would’ve just been a burden out here. I downsized a lot coming from L.A. I just realized, ‘I’m 23. There’s no reason for me to have all this shit.’” 

McLamb is sitting at Montague Diner in Brooklyn Heights, wearing a black sweater and earrings made of several soda can tabs that dangle as she speaks. She’s incredibly charming, encouraging of my strange order (“Chicken noodle soup can be very chic at 3 p.m. on a boiling hot day”) and honest about salad as leftovers (“It’s just a little bit sad”). 

She lives nearby with her boyfriend, in a great apartment she put a deposit on before she even visited. “Everyone told me the Number One thing is, do not get an apartment if you’ve not seen it in person,” she says. “But I asked [the landlord] over the phone, ‘Are you going to fuck me over?’ And he was like, ‘No, this is a good place.’ It worked out great.” She notes that her two cats are extremely happy there: “The window they look out of, shit actually happens on the street!”

McLamb chronicles her cross-country move in “God Take Me Out of L.A.,” out today. It’s an acoustic rallying cry for anyone who knows the home they’ve chosen for themselves isn’t quite right — a longing to escape and start over. McLamb, a North Carolina native, incorporates her Southern roots here, filling the track with delicate pedal steel as she bids farewell to Los Angeles: “I need to feel grass under my feet, and when I feel that pain/I need the sky to darken up and show me it knows my name/I can’t see the sun shine one more time/God, take me out of L.A.”

“I think it totally is an ‘out of respect, I can’t be here anymore,’” she says with a laugh. “I would hope that the song comes across as, ‘I’m not cut out for this.’ It’s not that there’s a problem with the city. A lot of it was me thinking about being from the South and experiencing the earth as a living, breathing thing, which feels more difficult to do in a city that is so sprawling — the desert atmosphere alone. I’m not used to not seeing green and feeling dirt and moisture. It was disorienting for me, and that song was me connecting. I felt stranded out there. It’s only natural to be like, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’” 

Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, who produced Going Through It, also worked on “God Take Me Out of L.A.” — humorous, considering that Tudzin (also known for her work with boygenius) is a diehard Californian. “It’s hard not to take that as a personal burn, because I deeply love L.A., but I also get it,” Tudzin tells me over the phone. “It’s a city that I think, much like New York, doesn’t work for everyone. But Eliza is loving New York. There’s some things about her that are so metropolitan. It was a good call.”

There’s one other reason you might have heard of McLamb: She’s also the co-host of Binchtopia, a feminist podcast that she and her friend Julia Hava started in their Los Angeles apartment at the height of the pandemic. Together, they delve into pop culture and the internet, covering everything from trad wives to 10-year-olds putting high-end skincare on their Christmas lists. “If Plato and Aristotle had internet addictions and knew what ‘gaslighting’ was, they’d probably make this podcast,” the description reads.

With nearly 15,000 paid subscribers on Patreon, the podcast is so successful that McLamb has been able to make it her day job, working out of an office in the “little corporate town” of Dumbo. It’s made her something of a celebrity in Brooklyn — she says an employee at the store Books Are Magic recently recognized and complimented her — even if her music (and her excellent Substack) are much less known for now. For McLamb, that’s OK.

“I see myself as a pretty classic artist,” she says. “Most people, if they’re going to try to hack it in the art world, are going to pick a lane and put all of their eggs in that basket, which makes sense because it’s extremely hard to find success in basically any area of the arts. But I’m not interested in that. I have very consciously resisted attempts to brand myself as one specific thing.”

She continues with a few big-picture comparisons: “Leonardo da Vinci invented a bunch of shit. Joni Mitchell thinks of herself as a painter first. That’s very much the school of thought that I’m in. There’s so many inspiring people who are doing all different kinds of work. Think of Michelle Zauner. She’s expanding people’s ideas for what the modern artist can look like.”

THOUGH SHE HAS BEEN writing songs as long as she can remember, growing up as an only child in Chapel Hill, McLamb never thought of it as a serious career path. She graduated high school a year early (“I was a valedictorian and had a voracious eating disorder,” she says) and attended George Washington University, studying political science with an eventual plan for law school. Then the pandemic hit. 

McLamb briefly went back home to North Carolina, hanging at her grandmother’s house on Topsail Island, before she decided to work on farms through the organic-agriculture organization WWOOF — one in Crumpler, North Carolina, and another in Kansas. “I had little to no physical skills at the time,” she says. “It’s embarrassing that I can’t work with my hands. I knew I wanted something that was grounding and challenging, but in a way that was healthy. Farming was everything I wanted it to be.”

While she was on the farms, McLamb started to upload songs onto TikTok. “I was hitting a really good streak with the algorithm,” she says. “There was one week where basically every song I posted was getting upwards of 700,000 views. TikTok was not really being used as much as it is now for music promotion, and we weren’t even really thinking about it that way at the time. It was more just a space to shout into the void and share your songs.”

When the platform launched the ability to respond to comments, McLamb started taking commissions. “I really liked the interactive element,” she says. “I started doing this thing where I said, ‘Comment something and I’ll write a song about it,’ and that was how I kept myself afloat financially.”

One song, “Porn Star Tits,” blew up on the platform. With lightning-fast lines jam-packed with ironic observations (“When I was 10 years old a man on the internet told me I had porn star tits/I didn’t know what that meant but I knew he was getting off on it”), the two-minute track is less indie-rock song, more twisted jingle. Suddenly, she realized she could make this her career. “A pathway opened in my mind,” she says. “Either I’m going to go back to school virtually for a degree that’s going to put me almost $100,000 in the hole, or I’m going to go back to live with my parents. I started thinking, ‘What if I took this seriously?’” 

McLamb says she was soon approached by almost every major label. “It would be people who would listen to me talk for 30 minutes about my goals as an artist, and then they’d be like, ‘Amazing. We’ll give you six figures to make a ‘Porn Star Tits’ music video in a bikini,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘OK, you’re not getting it.’ I wasn’t interested in any of that. I didn’t want to be the ‘Porn Star Tits’ girl.” 

Though she uploaded an extended version of “Porn Star Tits” on SoundCloud — and released it on her 2020 debut EP, Memos — she eventually removed it and deleted her TikTok. “It was my Number One streamed song and people occasionally still ask about it, but ultimately I’m glad I made the decision to take it down,” she says. “I made a very conscious decision to get off of there, and still most of the time in press, it’s ‘Eliza McLamb, the TikTok artist,’ and it confuses me. I’ve done as much as I can to distance myself from it.”

McLamb signed with Royal Mountain Records, a well-respected Canadian indie label known for its past work with Alvvays and Orville Peck. Tudzin remembers being introduced to her around this time: “I was told about ‘Porn Star Tits,’ and they were like, ‘It’s crazy, because she’s having a moment on TikTok, but it’s not really her bag.’ She had so many beautiful songs in the can already, but had a little bit of a spotlight moment with kind of a goofy one-off.”

McLamb and Tudzin headed to rural Washington and cut Going Through It at Bear Creek Studio, where Big Thief recorded U.F.O.F. The album shines with introspective tracks like the devastating “16,” the anthemic “Mythologize Me,” and the spellbinding “Anything You Want.” On “Glitter,” McLamb confronts a childhood friend with a bad partner: “I wanna kill your boyfriend,” she sings in the chorus. “When I come home on the holiday/You tell me everything/In my bed/Whispering like we’re 13 again.”

“I wanted to make a capital-R record,” McLamb says. “I wanted to make something that has a concept that’s intended to be listened to top-to-bottom. I’ve always thought of side A as you’re jumping into this body of water, and then you are coming back up to the surface with side B. Side A is almost like documentation of what’s happened, and side B is like, ‘OK. Now, what am I going to do about it?’”

Tudzin was wowed by McLamb’s songwriting prowess: “She’s like an author, approaching music in a very long-form prose style,” she says. She was also struck by how wise McLamb is for her age: “She was telling this story about how when she was in middle school, the news broke that Zayn had left One Direction, and her friend freaked out and threw up in the bathroom because she was so upset. And I was like, ‘Damn, I’m pretty sure that happened when I was in college.’ She really is just so smart and so mature and transcends her own age — until you start talking about One Direction milestones.”

Towards the end of her tour last spring, McLamb headed back into the studio with Tudzin to cut “God Take Me Out of L.A.” and “Lena Grove,” a previously released track she re-recorded with a full band. “Got a big tattoo in Colorado Springs/Jumped straight in the river just to feel the sting/Of a permanent decision on my fleeting physical body,” she sings.

That tattoo was a bolt cutter, after Fiona Apple’s 2020 landmark album Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In addition to Apple, McLamb’s musical idols lately include Wilco, Jason Molina, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Silver Jews. “I am very grateful for the millennial men in my life for turning me on to Wilco,” she jokes. “I used to make fun of them for it, and then I saw the light. I remember one time I put some live show on to work in the background to. That wonderful Jeff Tweedy warble — in the first five seconds, I immediately started welling up with tears.”  

In a few weeks, McLamb, Tudzin, and guitarist Jacob Blizard will head to upstate New York to write her next album. She’s not sure what the process will be, but she’s excited to be in a house surrounded by nature. “I noticed a screened-in porch and it was close to a creek,” she says. “Those are my two musts, and everything else I’m sure will fall into place. Maybe I’ll get a good pretzel.”