Album of the Week | Eliza McLamb: Going Through It

Eliza McLamb makes no secret of her own sensitivity. She wanders through the world with wide eyes, thin skin and a keen ability to poke fun at her own sentimentality while also treasuring it as her superpower. On her debut album Going Through It, the musician, essayist and podcaster—who semi-jokingly coined the phrase “bitches hate nuance”—shows a characteristically thoughtful embrace of life’s subtleties and contradictions. Going Through It takes the observational, humbly critical songwriting that propelled her two EPs, Memos and Salt Circle and refines it, looking back towards her past and assessing how it informs her future.

Birds chirp in the background of the soft, fingerpicked opener “Before,” as McLamb longs for “the time before knowing / the silence preceding a knock at the door” and tries to reconcile her desire to regain lost innocence with an understanding that she “can’t live in Before.” The following track, “Glitter,” is a bittersweet ballad about what happens when the wildness of girlhood is disrupted and forcibly tamed by the expectations of womanhood. It feels like a sister to the highlights from Lucy Dacus’ Home Video, with its warm, memory-hopping narrative and the intensity of its central friendship blurring the line between platonic and romantic.

“Crybaby” is yet another instance of McLamb both chastising and celebrating her younger self, a girl who grieved for roadkill and was too gentle to even steal the ball in a soccer game, instead preferring the non-competitive aspects of team sports: “I liked the part where we all stopped to eat cut fruit in the sun / I liked the part where we all shook hands and high-fived everyone,” she sings. We can only hope that right now somewhere, some teenager who is cooler and more tech-savvy than I’ll ever be is making Yellowjackets fancams to Eliza McLamb songs. The idealism of “Crybaby” becomes retroactively aspirational when contrasted with the following “16,” a slow, dissociative drone whose lyrics draw an unsettling and unglamorous portrait of a kid forced to become an adult. When the actual adults around her deal with reality by detaching completely, she follows suit.

But Going Through It isn’t just quiet introspection all the way down—the sprinkling of snarky, fast-paced rockers are where McLamb’s humor, hooks and self-aware star-power shine the brightest, proving that she and producer Sarah Tudzin are a perfect match. A pop-country romp with lyrics straight from a 12-step meeting for recovering Manic Pixie Dream Girls, “Mythologize Me” sounds like a song Taylor Swift might’ve written if she’d read Friedan and Butler in between recording Fearless and Speak Now. McLamb takes John Berger’s widely-cited and often decontextualized statement “men watch women, women watch themselves being looked at,” and paraphrases it in a droll deadpan that would make Liz Phair proud: “All I can do is fantasize about how you fantasize about me.”

Slide guitar slow-burner “Anything You Want” sees McLamb contending with identity-as-performance and her own need to constantly be “on.” In her newsletter, McLamb described it as “the place where I realize I cannot hide from myself.” The resigned, shaky, Fiona Apple-reminiscent “Bird,” the situationship-settler’s lament “Punch Drunk” and the aforementioned “Mythologize Me” show McLamb using a two-dimensional, romanticized idea of herself as a bandage covering the wound of having her humanity and complexity go neglected. On “Anything You Want,” she sits in the discomfort of learning to let herself be cared for. In a similar vein to Meredith Brooks declaring herself a bitch, a lover, a child, a mother, etc. or any one of Alanis Morissette’s gleeful self-contradictions, Eliza McLamb is “an outlet mall parking lot / an everclear on the rocks / a hanger-on of the band / a bug in your soda can.” When the final chorus unspools into an echoing outro, it’s the record’s most cathartic moment.

On “Modern Woman,” McLamb zooms out even further to interrogate contemporary womanhood’s identity crisis. She cycles through micro-identities—she’s a high-powered girlboss paying her bills, she’s a hot mess rotting away in her room, she’s a Sad Girl crying tears that are prettier and more meaningful than yours, she’s the kind of girl can pull off rhyming “Instagram” with “deli ham.” McLamb is the first to admit that she’s not above the influence of an atomized culture that’s constantly asking “what kind of Girl do YOU want to be?” so brands can sell your idealized It Girl self back to you and make you think it was your idea all along. “Can’t check out of what I am made for,” she sings at the chorus, an inadvertent response to Billie Eilish’s Barbie hit and a frustrated plea for her own selfhood to be freed from the constant cycle of hyper-individualization. Eliza McLamb is not here to tell us exactly what kind of girl she is—she’s still figuring that one out. In the meantime, she’ll do her best to hand the mic to all the people that she’s met.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.