Best of What's Next: Alaska Reid

For years, Paste has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers. The Best of What’s Next is a monthly profile column which highlights new acts with big potential—the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music. This month, we are highlighting the budding stardom of Alaska Reid.

Ever since she was a teenager, Alaska Reid has floated between Montana and Los Angeles. From ages 17 to 21, she played gigs in basements and churches and bars with her band Alyeska, and having a foot in both of those worlds is what has greatly shaped her own relatability. She has that Mountain West, small-town thoughtfulness and couples it with an understanding of coastal panache. Her dad hails from Willoughby, Ohio, a stone’s throw from where I grew up myself, and her extended family has roots in Erie, Pennsylvania. Before ending up in Montana, Reid was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the city where her parents met at the University of Michigan. At our Paste party in Austin in March, Reid took the indoor stage near the end of day one and stole the show. It was her aura and attitude that commanded the crowd, as her personality brightens like a Midwestern charm. “I definitely have a little bit of that vibe of ‘everywhere is home, but nowhere is home,’ which is an interesting thing that sparks a lot of creative inspiration—especially as a writer, because you can see things clearly at a distance,” Reid says.

She has spent the last period of her life opening for big-budget headliners like Caroline Polachek, Porches and Magadelana Bay. It makes sense, as her own music compliments the mainstream charts well without breaking into the margins of formulaic, stadium-sized eccentricies. I think that’s what drew me to Reid’s work immediately, because it felt like the perfect crossover in the singer/songwriter sphere. She was able to, all at once, channel digestible, accessible pop architecture while implementing rich, striking, narrative-driven tracks you might find on a mid-tier indie label brimming with critical darlings. Her debut record, Disenchanter, harnesses that median perfectly, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a record this year that’s anointed with benchmarks in so many subgenres. But it’s not a collage of different experimentations so much as it’s a well-woven tapestry of every single thing Reid does well.

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As someone who has also gone from living in a rural, sub-5,000-person town to a big city, I resonate with Reid’s trajectory. She didn’t go to high school in Montana, but she also didn’t have a foundation of people that she knew in LA, either. The transition was initially hard for her, and she quickly turned to literature as a means of escapism when being in a new place proved challenging. “I was reading a lot of Philip Pullman, the Golden Compass series,” she says. “I was just so freaked out, I think I was living in fantasy books in my head.” Parts of her family moved out to California, too—notably her sisters—and that helped her build a support system quickly. As is normal when migrating to a different part of the country, Reid felt like a fish out of water in a lot of ways—especially when confronted by strip mall culture and having to ask her peers what it was. “We’re in such a big country that it’s funny how places feel so completely different, as if it’s many countries within a big thing,” she adds. “I was like, ‘Oh there’s more than two brands of grocery stores?’”

Reid, now 26, notes that she didn’t have much of a teenage life, because she played music with older folks while in Montana. When she got to LA, it was more of the same, and she got super immersed within the scene in town. When a local blog called buzzbands.la started covering Reid’s work, she felt like she had finally become ingrained within the DNA of her new home. Folks were starting to notice her efforts. Early on, she’d don Patsy Cline dresses and play the Viper Room and Pig ‘n Whistle with songs featuring strange, alternate tunings. And, according to Reid herself, she “didn’t believe in metronomes.” “People were supportive, but I definitely also learned to be tough—because it’s harsh. Some guys are angry and people don’t really want to hear a girl in an apron dress doing experimental, odd Neil Young B-side-but-without-vocal kind of vibes. It’s hard to find your audience no matter what you do,” she adds.

The days of grinding as a kid not even old enough to drive are in the past for Reid, who’s now fully comfortable in the world of gigging. She mentions a time when she played a House of Blues set while a Lakers game was also going on, and everyone in the audience was more fixated on that than her singing. But she has put in the work to get to Disenchanter, and her showmanship is fully on display now, too. In a world where many acts are popping up out of nowhere and being lauded as one-in-a-million rising stars, Reid is on the other side of the spectrum—as she’s paid her due and is, deservedly, reaping the benefits of a packed resume assembled long before making her debut album.

Reid’s first foray into recorded work was an EP called Big Bunny, which she released in 2020. At nine tracks and a 32-minute runtime, you might be compelled to call it an LP. But she has never been caught up in the requirements that set the official distinction. “To me, [Big Bunny] felt like an EP, it was done in a really scrappy way,” Reid says. “I did a lot of it during COVID, I didn’t have any funding for it. I didn’t have a recording budget. It was really just me, alone, in my room, learning how to use Logic. It felt like an EP because I was discovering myself.” Reid’s partner, A.G. Cook—who has been Charli XCX’s longtime co-writer and producer, came in at the end of the writing period and helped produce the final cut of Big Bunny. Cook returns again on Disenchanter, and, musically, his experience with pop music didn’t initially line up with the experimental, noisy work Reid was doing as an up-and-coming artist in LA—and it wasn’t immediately easy for Reid to embrace the magic of Top-40 poptimism.

“I was so against all pop music, for some reason, when we met,” she says. “I didn’t know who he was. I was like, ‘I hate everything pop and these guys writing pop songs. It’s so dumb.’ It’s really interesting to grow up and be less curmudgeony. I feel like that’s been a process for me, because I went from being like, ‘I will not use a metronome, I will not use effects pedals’ to ‘I love metronomes, I am obsessed with effects pedals.’ I think that the craft of pop music and the people that do it is really fascinating and really cutting edge. A.G. was an important part of helping me see that, even if you choose to do a genre, it doesn’t mean that’s your only knowledge. A lot of people I meet who work in the pop industry have a classical music background or know all these cool things, like that Paul Westerberg album that he did solo. I had a very particular set of things I was exposed to growing up. I couldn’t name a 2000s to 2010 pop song easily, because I just wasn’t exposed to that. I was listening to The Breeders.”

Growing up in country-focused Montana, it’s no surprise that the pop charts weren’t such a prevalent thing in Reid’s immediate reach. In fact, Big Bunny does a great job gnawng at the singularity of her hometown and how that Americana follows her everywhere. On our call, Reid recounts riding four-wheelers with friends and then hearing a Backstreet Boys song for the first time on a toy radio and dancing, albeit hesitantly—fearing that a melody so catchy was like candy that would send her into a tailwind. Cook’s approach to pop music, however, gels perfectly with her songwriting—especially in how her approach is heavily rooted in storytelling, even when pop traditionalism is indebted to the practice of getting a story across in the most succinct way possible.

And what Disenchanter is, at its core, is a terrific, one-of-a-kind album. It’s got elements that will shine if Reid performs solo or has a full band behind her—and so few projects these days possess that duality. The record’s sonic components exude visual stimulants, too, which stems from her time as an art major at UCLA. But, what I love most about Disenchanter is how cinematic it is—as if it’s derived from a Psychedlic Furs or Jesus and Mary Chain family tree. Much of that is a direct result of Reid’s vivid command on prose and poetics merging with Cook’s understanding of electronic soundscapes. Beyond their private relationship together, what they bring to each other musically is a perfect match.

Reid recorded much of Disenchanter by herself on Logic, producing the songs in a more guitar-oriented way that she deems “wordy.” She would then upload the stems of those tracks onto Cook’s computer and he would transform them with synths and bass—all while keeping the foundation of her complex guitar parts that interlock with melodies almost fully intact. Disenchanter, in turn, is a full ecosystem of tones that feel like high-definition, expansive renderings of the sonic eccentricities Reid made her calling card in LA years ago rather than an adoption of pop traditions.

“He’s a very flexible producer. His whole thing with my stuff is, he’s just like, ‘I want it to sound like you and I want to emphasize stuff and bring out the cool moments more.’ That was really our thing,” Reid explains. “The couple of songs that I co-wrote with him, it’s nice for me to not be burdened with the chord-making—because it’s so deep with me, because I’m doing these alternate tunings and getting really big. He’ll give me chords and then I’ll do the lyrics and the melody and it’ll be an interesting, different position to take. The album is either all me in this very insular, guitar/lyric role, like on ‘She Wonders’ and ‘Dogs & Girls,’ or the co-writes that are an exercise for me to untether myself from directly writing with my guitar.”

Reid’s dad is a novelist, and the songs on Disenchanter take a very literary approach that can only be gleaned through spending years in direct adjacency to the craft. Inspired by the work of authors like Graham Greene, Reid is very much a bibliophile—and a lot of her songwriting has become a product of trying to pinpoint a direction she wants to explore and then forcing herself to go down that route. If she has the desire to write a song that has the strong, punchy, chaotic imagery that you’d find in an excerpt from a James Crumley novel, then she’s going to force herself to tap into that place in a direct way.

“Stuff blows me away all the time, authors and other artists. But what it is, actually, is me working through the sludge in my own brain to try and do what I want to do and be conscious of that. Because I think a lot of Big Bunny is me accidentally doing these things—and then it call comes from emotion and it works out and it feels like a lock, sometimes, where I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, this has a double-meaning that I always wanted to put in there, but I didn’t realize that I was writing it to that degree.’ I think what [Disenchanter] is is me hacking through weeds, hacking through the sludge, and being like, ‘I want to write this this way exactly, and I’m going to do that. And this is how I do that.’ And I’m not there yet, I don’t know if you ever get there. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff in the same sphere since I was younger, and I think that really informed the way I think. But trying to actually execute it in a conscious way is a whole different thing,” Reid says.

“Palomino”—which Reid co-wrote with Cook and their friend Waylon Rector for a side-project called Sugar Huff that never materialized—is told from the perspective of her mother, while “She Wonders” germinated on-tour and catalogs vignettes of a fraction of life spent on the road. “The mist of Texas rain makes a halo around her face and he asks her on the Jackalope patio, ‘Do you feel like a rock star on stage?’” she sings on the latter, before crescendoing into a beautiful, celestial wisp of ASMR-style vocalization. “Dogs & Girls” transcribes Reid seeing a missing person poster at a roadside casino in Nevada. “Back to This” was formed after she witnessed a group of smoke jumping forest service workers on a break in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. “Dust in their hair, sun on their skin, kiss away the boredom ‘til the fires begin,” she sings atop a cosmic guitar and watery synths. “Will you and I be as beautiful years later in this sweaty photograph?”

For Reid, Disenchanter is a collection that is variably autobiographical with embellishments of strangers’ stories and fictional detours. Think of it as a hybrid literary exercise, in which she is a sorcerer who bends the way the world orbits. Instead of letting the universe move around her, it moves through her. Much of that attention to imagery and syntax is coupled with the catharsis of daydreaming. Reid plays a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, on our call, she’s decked out in all Renaissance Faire jewelry. It was easy for her to title Big Bunny, because it was lifted from a part of the tracklist.

But, when it came time to put a name on her debut album, it wasn’t until Cook gave her a copy of the Fiend Folio D&D manual that she found what she’d been looking for. When Reid saw the Disenchanter—a dromedary creature who feeds on the dweomer of magic—she saw an anteater-like figure taking a charm out of a shield, and she knew that it was the one word she needed—it was the perfect summary of her own fantastical approach to narrative. “I was like, ‘That’s what writers do, they suck the magical experiences out or they try and gather that energy and metabolize it into something else,’” she adds.

If Reid ever becomes a best-selling author, it’ll come as no surprise. On Disenchanter, she finds herself as the spell-binding curator of not just her own stories, but those being lived out by the people close to her. Whether it’s a forest firefighter, a missing child, her own romance or a diary of days spent playing shows across the country, the world of Alaska Reid is one worth tapping into. Growing up in the middle-of-nowhere, she found life in the mundane everyday and spun it into a fairytale coming to life in her own backyard. “We were 16 years old, started taking birth control, swerving for deer in the road,” she sings to a bygone Montana friend on “French Fries.” “You never told me certain secrets. If you had it, you would keep it. I was younger but now I know. Oh, I won’t judge you. You can cry, oh, but I judge you for all the missing times.” Disenchanter isn’t just a beautiful, ambitious blend of pop and distorted alt-rock; it’s a tempest of personal reflection and appreciation of others. And, for as much focus that she puts on others, Reid very often pulls the camera back onto her own history and the people within it.

“Art is what makes life worth living for me, along with family and stuff,” she says. “I’m constantly presented with books or movies that show this thing that I wish I was living in at night. I think I’m almost writing for myself and for other people to be like, ‘Oh, this is the magic.’ It’s creating an escape zone, but it’s also making me realize that people and things around me are actually worthy and magical. I find myself boring, to a degree, so it’s interesting to think about other people and blend things—like a lot of the great writers I know.”

Watch Alaska Reid’s performance at our Paste party in Austin here.

Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s assistant music editor. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, but you can find him online @yogurttowne.

Best of What’s Next: Alaska Reid