Lizzy McAlpine - Five Seconds Flat

Lizzy McAlpine's second album came out in April 2022 to a modest reception and then refused to go away. Five Seconds Flat was conceived as a companion to a short film, structured like a breakup told out of order, and it found its audience the slow way — one song at a time, mostly through people sending it to each other.

"Ceilings" is the one that broke, eventually, more than a year after release, on the strength of a key change and a last verse that reframes everything before it. But the album is more varied than that single suggests. "Doomsday" opens on horns and a funeral metaphor. "Erase Me" brings in Jacob Collier and turns into something almost gospel. "Reckless Driving" is a duet with Ben Kessler that plays like an argument. "Orange Show Speedway" closes on the loudest arrangement here.

McAlpine writes with an unusual amount of specificity — named streets, exact rooms, times of day — which is why the record survives repeated listening rather than dissolving into mood. She has since moved somewhere folkier, and this remains the one people arrive through.

Single LP from Harbour Artists & Music.