Eliza McLamb announces Illuminati Hotties-produced Salt Circle E

Singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb is coming of age right in front of us. When the beginning of the pandemic interrupted McLamb’s studies at George Washington University, she eschewed the pre-law path she’d planned for herself and headed west. She started sharing original songs on TikTok while working on farms in North Carolina and Kansas, and was shocked to see her videos find a devoted audience. “I’d been writing songs since I was six years old. It just never really occurred to me that there would be anyone interested,” says McLamb.

Soon, her intimate songs about relationships, body image, and the complexities of life as a young woman started racking up millions of views apiece. Her earliest tracks were deeply personal, made from nothing but her voice and a guitar and recorded in the laundry shed where she lived at the time. Nevertheless, they contained something that resonated — an intimacy borne from her ability to speak to the universal while also speaking only for herself.

Last month McLamb announced her signing to Royal Mountain Records (Wild Pink, Pillow Queens, Girlpuppy), with a track called “Doing Fine“, that received a glowing write up from FADER, who said that McLamb “pins down big feelings with sharp observations” adding that her writing is “sharp and heavy at the same time, packing a heftier kick than her singer-songwriter peers.” Today, McLamb is back to announce her debut EP Salt Circle, produced by Sarah Tudzin (aka Illuminati Hotties), and sharing a new track entitled “Pulp.”

LISTEN:
to Eliza McLamb’s “Pulp”
HERE

“Sometimes you stumble into a moment and know that it is the pulp of life – the very best that existence has to give you,” McLamb says of the track. “This song is about knowing that you cannot hold on to everything, that those moments must pass through you, and that nostalgia is as painful as it is beautiful.”

“The EP encapsulates this idea of processing the world and your life and trying to make some meaning out of it,” McLamb explains. “The arc of the EP starts with songs about me feeling very disillusioned with what my life is ending up to be — not so much in the material circumstances but in the ways that my consciousness is dealing with it.

“It’s this negotiation of, like, how can I hold on to the things that I love in a world where everything is changing? How can I be happy with my circumstances when I have this war going on inside of me? And how can I learn to accept myself as a person who is deeply feeling and deeply sensitive? The whole thing is basically me deciding if I want to really live life the way that I know I’m meant to, which is a deeply feeling person… And if I want to be a part of that, or if I want to check out of that.”

The subtle power of McLamb’s music is her ability to make every listener feel personally and intimately spoken to. To her audience, her music is a whispered revelation; it often feels reciprocal, like a secret shared between friends. It’s an energy that’s also fostered in her writing, her warm social media presence, and her podcast, Binchtopia, where her wry cultural commentary has drawn a legion of fans.

It’s perhaps more accurate, though, to describe experiencing McLamb’s music as peering into an interior world — reading the diary, pulling back the curtain, catching a glimpse of the deeply personal machinations of someone else’s life. McLamb’s music at times offers such an authentic interrogation of her own experiences that it can feel like something we were never meant to see. It’s all the more impressive, then, that there’s something so universal nestled inside her echoing verses and yearning vocals.

“It’s always an internal process,” McLamb says. “But when I write a song that’s principally just for me, that I wrote to figure out some emotion or to express some story or something like that, and then I put it out into the world, there have always been people who resonate so deeply with it. They look at that piece of art that I made for me and say, ‘Oh, this feels like it’s for me.’ And that in so many ways reinforces my spirituality, honestly — my inherent belief that we are all part of one collective energy source, and that we all experience very similar things and have solidarity in our emotions and our sensitivity.”

Eliza McLamb’s Salt Circle will be released on December 2nd on Royal Mountain. It is available to pre-order here.