Lindsey Jordan has a lot of firepower for an 18-year-old. The Maryland-based Matador Records signee was stylishly clad with a red guitar in tow and sleek shades. Throughout the set, the band gave way to the commanding Jordan for a powerful 40 minutes in front of what felt like the largest crowd of the day. Something big is brewing here, take note…For Indie rock wunderkind Lindsey Jordan and her band, Snail Mail, have announced the release of their debut album. Lush, which follows 2017’s Habit EP, is out June 8th via Matador Records.
“Pristine” continues the personal, intimate feel of Habit, which was written in Jordan’s suburban bedroom. But “Pristine” aims a bit higher, with soaring choruses and crisp guitars crafting a shimmering backdrop for Jordan’s musings on young love. “Don’t you like me for me?” she sings. “I know myself, I’ll never love anyone else.”
Ah, to be young. And yet, “Pristine” is a grand step forward for a promising songwriter who — despite the hype — is really just getting started.
At age 18, Brooklyn-based Baltimore kid Lindsey Jordan has already been through a whirlwind word-of-mouth rise through the underground, a round of breathless media exaltation, a SXSW star tour, and a label bidding war that landed her band Snail Mail on historical indie-rock pillar Matador Records. So what does everybody see in her? Debut EP Habit is pretty much all we have to go on so far, but it presents Jordan as a natural, a songwriter capable of spinning magic from a few guitar chords and howled phrases. Her lo-fi guitar ballads glimmer in their grime, wringing uncommon beauty from indie rock’s basic toolkit. Imagine Waxahatchee under the influence of both Sonic Youth and actual youth, and you’ll begin to understand what all the fuss is about.
“I hated every single person I played with,” Lindsey Jordan I got treated pretty poorly. Everyone was nasty, everyone was alt-right. It was very frat-bro even when I was eight.”
Jordan, is the singer, guitarist and principle songwriter of Maryland indie rock trio Snail Mail, she is recalling her experiences playing on a boys’ ice hockey team. The sport is her other love besides music. It has become something of a litmus test for navigating a turbulent music industry, riddled as it is with sexism, greed and sexual misconduct . Despite no longer playing ice hockey, Jordan remains a fervent follower of the sport. She applies much of the discipline and determination learnt from her athletic years to her music career.
This resolute and precocious stance has served Jordan and her band members well. Snail Mail was formed in early 2015 off the back of an opportune moment to play a local festival. Jordan’s friend, Angie Swiecicki, from the post punk band Post Pink, was playing at Baltimore’s Unregistered Nurse. Swiecicki offered to help Jordan get a slot at the festival if she formed a band.
After quickly enlisting friends Ryan Vieira on bass and Shawn Durham on drums, Jordan just had two weeks to galvanise the group to play what was supposed to be a one-off show. She had been a guitarist since the age of five but this was her first band. “I didn’t really have any plans or desires to play anything after that,” she explains, “but then it just started going really well.”
Snail Mail played the festival alongside Priests, Sheer Mag, and Screaming Females. Washington DC punks Priests were so impressed with the band that they proposed releasing a cassette on their label, Sister Polygon.
The aptly titled Habit EP – a collection of Jordan’s bedroom songs written out of “old habit” during her high school years – was released in July 2016. The band (Brown and Russell having replaced Vieira and Durham) got to work, busying itself with gigs in DC and Baltimore.
Habit EP opener “Thinning” perfectly encapsulates the oft confused soul-searching of adolescence. A lo-fi lode of jangly, open-tuned guitars and scrubby drums sit behind Jordan’s mumblings of certain uncertainty. She darts between wanting to waste the entire year “just face down/and on my own time” and spending the rest of it asking herself “Is this who you are?” while feeling “gross” about it all anyway. One imagines that the restlessness in “Thinning” – its lyrics “hot head and dreamless sleep” – sprouts from suburban boredom. But the song’s propulsive rhythm and anthemic guitars exercise an opposing force: excitement and resolve.
Brooklyn-via-Baltimore singer /songwriter/guitar prodigy Lindsey Jordan aka Snail Mail is the latest addition to the Matador Records roster. Snail Mail will release a full-length album in 2018, following SisterPolygon’s 2017 12″ reissue of the of the introductory cassette, ‘Habit’. Snail Mail’s NPR Tiny Desk concert premiered this morning, and might provide a hint or several why press, musical peers (including but not limited to Waxahatchee, Priests and Girlpool), and yeah, record labels have taken so much interest in a short spell..
Jordan has a voice that only comes along every now and then … she is able to fit a universe of emotion into a single turn of phrase without any vocal affectation … whether she’s muttering or shouting, you feel the heartbreak, the frustration, the joy that came with writing these lyrics”
Jordan started Snail Mail at 15 and released the quietly stunning Habit EP via Priests‘ in-house label last year. She’s quickly found fans in Helium and Ex Hex’s Mary Timony (who also happens to be Jordan’s guitar teacher) and just went on tour with Waxahatchee and Palehound. She’s just signed to Matador Records.
Set List
“Slug”
“Thinning”
“Anytime”
MUSICIANS
Lindsey Jordan (electric guitar, vocals); Raymond Brown (drums); Alex Bass (bass)
Snail Mail is the lo-fi bedroom pop project of singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan. She’s a thoughtful lyricist who tends to buck the ‘woe is me’ cliche in favor of a wider, balanced perspective focused on forward motion. This refreshing view is shared over dreary textures, slow moving guitar work and Jordan’s effortlessly melodic vocal presence.
http:// Band Members
Lindsey Jordan – Guitar and Vocals
Alex Bass – Bass
Ray Brown – Drums
The Fat Angel Sings 