All Hail Snail Mail!

BY: Rudie Obias

Singer/Songwriter Lindsey Jordan is a musical prodigy. The 18-year-old began playing and writing music when she was only five years old in her hometown of Ellicott City, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. Jordan was so enamored with music that she released her first solo EP Sticki at age 15 before starting a band called Snail Mail the following year.

Snail Mail gained a lot of attention in 2016 with the release of the band’s first EP Habit, a six-track recording that featured songs about growing up with uncertain and uneasy emotions with an itch to leave your hometown to be the person you know you can be.

Throughout the EP, Jordan, who is the band’s primary songwriter and frontwoman, captures a playfulness and color that comes with youthful energy. However, she has a maturity and a way with words that’s completely beyond her years — especially in songs like “Thinning,” where she turns losing weight into a metaphor for her emotional imbalance.

“All the songs on Habit are collectively like: a sigh,” Lindsey Jordan told Pitchfork. “At this point in my life, I’ve found who I am, and what I’m doing, and who my friends are, and who I want to be—but while I was writing that EP, I was just so unsure and unhappy. I felt really complacent. Most of the songs were me having these crazy unattainable crushes and being like, ‘What am I doing?’”

Lindsey Jordan is just so cool! She even got permission from her parents, teachers, and principal to leave high school early to go on tour with bands like Priests, Girlpool, Waxahatchee, and Beach Fossils, while also being a featured artist at SXSW in 2017. In fact, Snail Mail was also one of the best and brightest from this year’s Austin, Texas music festival.

Snail Mail’s clean guitar riff sound is influenced by a number of indie “shredders” like Kurt Vile, Marnie Stern, and namely, Mary Timony of 90s indie rock band Helium. In fact, Timony was so impressed with Lindsey Jordan that the two started working together.

“I can’t take any credit for her skill—she was already a really great guitar player before we started meeting,” said Mary Timony, to Pitchfork.com. “The first time she played me songs she was writing, I was totally blown away. There is this real timelessness and maturity and depth in her music. It’s like she is a conduit and just channels this universal musical energy.”

Throughout 2017, Snail Mail built quite the following doing the rounds on YouTube music channels like AudioTree and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. Their appearance on NPR gained the band over 140,000 views with comparisons to other indie phenoms like Julien Baker.

Snail Mail signed to Matador Records in September 2017 with their debut album, Lush, due to drop on June 8th.