Art School Girlfriend

There are several ways to think about the imperative of the title for Art School Girlfriend’s third album, and it’s that multiplicity which is the source of these ten songs’ formidable power. Lean In: to what? First: lean in to ambiguity, to the unknown, to – in Polly Mackey’s own words – a ‘positive nihilism’. It’s this openness which has created an album both beautifully questing and singularly focussed. ‘I’m notgiving an answer,’ she says, ‘I’m embodying the questions. These songs have ended up with a kind of socio-political, cultural lens, not by telling people what to think, but by asking how the fuck to navigate where we are.’

Second: lean in to doing it yourself, and doing it for yourself. Mackey wrote, recorded and produced Lean In by herself, in a studio she built, during a time when she was seriously contemplating quitting her public-facing music persona (despite having just finished a sell-out tour). ‘I decided to carry on purely for the love of the process: to just forget about everything else,’ Mackey explains. Her disregard for ‘an industry that increasingly treats the art as “content” and judges its value via data and algorithmic potentiality’ has resulted in her most immediate and attention-grabbing work to date: not from a striving for it, but because of a mastery of her craft that came from taking her own time and space. Forging ‘a studio of one’s own’, as Mackey refers to it, gave her the freedom to pursue ‘all the sonic and emotional rabbit warrens I’d yet to explore’, and Lean In is full of an astonishing array of musicality, textures and ideas that feel effortlessly synthesised. Third: lean in to the hybrid aesthetic of the electronic and the organic. ‘I wanted to make an electronica album that had an inherent sense of humanness, intimacy, tactility, physicality: all the flaws leaned in to. ’ Instead of importing a library sample of vinyl crackle, Mackey manipulates a field recording of hail on her windows, or processes the sound of sea foam. It’s this attention to both the organic and the digital that means you could equally call Mackey the PJ Harvey of electronic music or the Aphex Twin of guitar jams. It’s this skill that has resulted in one of the finest auteurs of electronica, Daniel Avery, asking for Mackey’s collaboration on a track from his forthcoming album, where Mackey sits alongside a roster of respected artists such as Alison Mosshart from The Kills (one of Mackey’s own heroes). Since releasing her first self-produced EP on Paul Epworth’s Wolf Tone label in 2017, Art School Girlfriend has established herself as a master of the sonic space that realises electronica through a songwriter and shoegazer perspective; her albums Is It Light Where You Are (2021) and Soft Landing (2023) were acclaimed for how they deftly painted emotions with sound. Having toured the UK, Europe and USA extensively since 2017, her rise has been one of a steady, cult, word-of-mouth from both fans and her peers. With music that reveals its depths and details over years of listening,Lean In arrives at a time where her audience has grown exponentially, partly due to her diverse involvement across the music scene at large – contributions to the work of Lane 8, Jasper Tygner and Ghostpoet; being chosen by Bonobo to DJ at his Outliers series at Drumsheds; touring the US with both The Japanese House and Marika Hackman; a notable DJ set for HOR; producing and engineering for up-and-coming post-rock band Pencil; the tastemaker curation of her 5-years-in-the-running monthly radio show on Foundation FM. Mackey speaks of making Lean In whilst feeling ‘a lot of things in parallel: grief, joy, love, anxiety, hopelessness, hopefulness, age, capitalism, technology’. Riding these parallelisms beyond binary collapse was both a key theme and a key to ASG’s process for the album. This is music made to listen to on headphones, while turning you outward to what’s important in the world — loved ones, natural spaces, and connection. It’s music that makes you lose your shit dancing — but in the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep for anxiety. ‘The album is very existential. Over the last few years I’ve experienced for the first time what people call “Big Life Shit.” Everything in life had been distilled down to its purest essence, and it terrified me to see it so purely because it just felt so incredibly precious and fragile. It’s the price you pay for having lots of amazing things to care about.’ The first spitting, galloping bars of The Peaks, which sound like the very sonic manifestation of zoning in and psyching up with a kind of crystalline gutpunch. The track acts as a microcosm for the album, a statement of intent. The electronic-organic hybridity, the gorgeous melodic twists that mirror rugged landscapes bent by natural forces, the unparalleled production born from time, space and expertise, the lyrics exploring the tension of, in Mackey’s words, ‘desperately wanting to stay alive for the people you love — a health anxiety borne out of discovering true happiness’; the darkness, the light and the galloping, singular beats: they’re all there. The album plays on with an immediacy that came from freedom and experimentation, facilitated by Mackey’s self-designed studio space. On every song on Lean In, the beats are distinct and exquisitely crafted, though in future-classic L.Y.A.T.T. and heartsoaring Hope More, Hopeless, the 4-on-the-floors hit hard. L.Y.A.T.T. explores the ‘resilience of love through times of physical or mental distance and hardship’ and contains one of those precious first-listen moments when the initial disorientation of a gnarled, roiling hybrid guitar-synth melodic line is given the fierce form of a persistent heartbeat by techno beats and flickering hi-hats. Hope More, Hopeless asks whether hope is a naively optimistic act in 2025/2026, and what begins in a hazy ambient fog ultimately resolves in an Sound Of Silver style climax. Disillusionment has never sounded so good on Doing Laps, which voices Mackey’s moment of breaking from the incessant album-tour-pile-up cycle with a gorgeous, wry and moving precision. ‘Tried a fantasy out / never knew it was boring. Live your life on a string / noticing when you stop calling / a spade is a spade’ Mackey sings in her hypnotising voice, pissed off, tired but resolute. These are the lyrics of a songwriter who’s seen it all, done the laps, and is transcending. ‘The dichotomy persists,’ explains Mackey: ‘continue releasing music into an ecosystem that offers little remuneration and contributes to the cultural devaluation of music, or withdraw entirely and create solely for personal pleasure?’ Radio static — recorded from a 1970s transistor radio — builds and releases throughout, and ticking hi-hat and cajoling treadmill beat are cut across by the soft bubble of the synth refrain, like atactile, meditative finger tap. Within the dichotomy Mackey talks of, she injects her own space, her own peace. On tracks like Almost Transparent, Mackey’s innovation shine through: recordings of rivers and lakes taken using a hydrophone are manipulated to sound near-digital, whilst a wistful earworm vocal refrain chimes over the top, until the water rises, creating a genuine, death-defying drop as the song literally submerges underwater… only to burst, re-surfacing, into the euphoric, salty sunshine with renewed clarity. This feels like dance music made far away from machismo. ‘The recording and producing of this album myself carries a politics whether I like that or not,’ explains Mackey: ‘the sad statistic that only 2% of technical credits on records are women or gender-expansive. I’ve taught production and engineering for almost six years at university level and even today the numbers are nowhere near being equal — it can cause an imbalance of energy and authority in these creative and technical spaces. I was the first woman to lead a recording studio module at my institute: isn’t that sad?’ On Yellow Light, a song inspired by the poem Rubber by Stephen Seabridge, Mackey processes the difficulties of her queer adolescence and the delayed self-actualisation that can often be a byproduct of resisting who you are. She utters the simultaneously heartbreaking and euphoric line ‘The world only starts to turn when you let it’. Mackey enlists backing vocals from her wife, Marika Hackman, at key moments across the record, and it’s these kinds of practical touches in the album which remind us that, whilst Mackey is questioning things, embracing difficulty and dichotomy, she is not giving up: the album serves as a monument to the great loves in life that make it worth leaning into. ‘I think this is the most in love with music I’ve been since I was a teenager,’ says Mackey. ‘If I’m not making it, I’m thinking about it, lecturing on it, reading about it, teaching people how to record it, listening to it, researching it. I’m such a problem solver, but making music helps me lean in to things that can’t be solved. I’m leaning in to the feelings I have, I’m leaning in to the decisions I make, leaning in to the sounds I love, leaning in to life.’