Eliza McLamb’s Going Through It Orbits Unsteady Memory with Deep-Rooted Lyrics

Photo by Kaya Kelley

When someone says they’re “going through it,” the collective internet colloquial points toward a real bad time. But for Eliza McLamb, “going through it” means more than that; the title came out of a cross-country, salt-circle like, mind meld between herself and her “universe best friend” on FaceTime late in the release process. The phrase is the first indication of the role time and memory play in the album.

“In the space between childhood and womanhood, I feel like maybe you're kind of in that space for a long time,” McLamb says in an interview with Pleaser. “You're in this place of reflection where you are sort of indexing your experiences and your memories. And you're thinking about what to take with you, basically into the person that you can create for yourself now.”

Just as she’s depicted about to break through the water on the cover, Going Through It follows a narrative of emergence from “Before,” which is the apt title of the first track, many listeners relate to deeply. Though personal and vulnerable, McLamb’s lyrics open a space for her fans to connect with themselves through their interpretations. She says it’s not actually quite so important what her songs “mean.”

“Ultimately, I'm not the arbiter of the truth for the song,” McLamb says. “And in fact, a truth about the song doesn't exist.”

And yet, it’s clear to any listener that McLamb has sat long with the feelings she brings to each song, grounding them in stark visuals that contrast often confusing feelings. Fans prepared themselves to be more emotionally impacted than ever following a five-single lead-up; from a second anthem on female friendship (“Glitter”) to a soft rock tale, featuring muffled screams, of feeling unlovable (“Anything You Want”), Going Through It was certainly met with big hopes. 

Photo by Missy McLamb

But each new track — well, those Meta failed to stop her from playing on Instagram Live in the days leading up to release — dug deep. Her vivid lyrics, beginning with a splintering dock and ending with a rejoice for physicality (which nearly blend into one another if played on a loop) showcase how McLamb lays plain years of feeling in just 12 tracks over 45 minutes. 

This is precisely her biggest pride in the album: each word is hers and hers alone. The sounds, brought in by her producer Sarah Tudzin and recording musicians, wander and play and sometimes rage, but every narrative moment is fully controlled — sometimes even acting in conversation across songs. It’s perhaps exactly why the album has the freedom to refuse to be pinned down to a single genre; McLambs narrative cannot be contained in the same way a memory can never be finite to her.

There’s a lullaby-like snare beat to which she waxes about dating a man-child (“Bird”), a rock-dance anthem on the pitfalls of being a woman in the internet age (“Modern Woman”), and a brutally vulnerable song about the traumas McLamb experienced as a teen (“16”). Whether the boxes are indie, pop, rock, or another Spotify daylist-esque mash of words, Going Through It won’t fit in one alone. 

“I feel like people are struggling to categorize it, which I really like,” she says. 

On her previous EP Salt Circle, McLamb laments a theme that shows up again here: “Time is a slippery disc and memory is all that’s mine.” Threads between lyrics and movement between energy levels show the chronology of the album is about as consistent as memory can be — which is to say, for McLamb, that an order of operations is hard to fathom.

The A-side of the album gives listeners a largely teenage voice in “Glitter,” while being defensive (and aware of it) in “Mythologize Me.” But the acknowledgement of self-infliction in “Punch Drunk” opens the door for the narrative to be cracked open by “Crybaby” and looks up from the depths underwater in “16.” The latter is pivotal for the narrative, and made a surprising choice for a single that showed listeners this album would offer far more than indie pop ready to be sung back by a crowd. 

“Crybaby” gazes affectionately upon a childhood self who couldn’t steal the ball in a soccer game, who held funerals for roadkill, and asks, “Ain’t it lonely knowing everything is so lovely?” In the second chorus, she reveals a daily wish for this nature to turn to cynicism. But, in a turn of lyric — from ascribed noun to relieving verb — McLamb sings, “It’s okay to cry, baby,” the first step of acceptance going forward to the B-side.

“I think ‘Crybaby’ can come across as a relatively enlightened or peaceful song in terms of making peace with being a sensitive person and all of that stuff,” McLamb says. “It makes sense that it kind of let the floodgates go for ‘16’ to happen because it's saying, ‘I am a person who experiences profound sensitivity and profound pain. Now, what is it?’ Then you can look at it from there.”

In juxtaposition, B-side track “Bird” rehashes the suspension of the reality McLamb sang about in her EP track “Playhouse,” one where a relationship that seems fun on the surface is somewhere closer to dissociative. The track stands out starkly from others in a tune that feels straight out of “Over the Garden Wall,” complete with croaking frogs (which McLamb really sang to outside Bear Creek Studios) and bike bells. Nestled between an intense single (“Anything You Want”) and scaled back, close-to-the-chest ballads (“Just Like Mine”), “Bird” stands out unexpectedly — an exciting deviation from what listeners might be expecting from McLamb sonically.

“Strike,” also opens a new door in McLamb’s discography: a romantic love song which she once told a Brooklyn crowd is a challenge to write as a Capricorn. But, like her other landmark tracks, “Strike” doesn’t subscribe to a set of rules that already exists for her love letter. She lets in the violence at the chorus, “Giving you a knife to hold at my throat / sending for a flood and watching it go / I’d soften underneath your blow,” admitting between sweet memories of tender care that even the kindest love can be terrifying when that’s new.  

“It is very vulnerable and difficult to express to somebody that they really mean a lot to you, which is, I think, a theme in most of my work … Like, I hate this vulnerable space that I'm in … it's so hard for me. And then I'm like, oh, then I'll just write about that,” McLamb says. “I was able to kind of allow myself to really write what I was feeling, and that's always the secret.”

Photo by Missy McLamb

As a final connecting thread, “To Wake Up” closes the album with a question that is also an answer to the challenges throughout the previous 11 tracks. In “16,” McLamb recalls the “inexplicable” of continuing to wake up and keeps “walking forward into the dusk.” In “To Wake Up,” she revisits this mystery: “I have walked out from the dusk and when the sun is rising / I’ll let it / I will.”

Despite it all, her position as a podcaster which lands her face in the New York Times or as a singer about to embark on a full headlining tour, McLamb is driven to let the art exist somewhere outside her. 

“If I could be a vaporous gas and just emit songs, I would,” she says. “It seems weird because I write so personally and so much about my life, but if I could disconnect, if I could just have the songs be there and float around it like a wisp, I would.”

The feeling of autobiography that so many singer / songwriters walk the line of isn’t so important to her — though so many lyrics are more than specific. But maybe that’s exactly what draws her listeners so far in: her lyrics, wholly hers, are suspended within an album that drifts between voices and time, dismissing the importance of “when” or “why,”  so much as “how” a feeling takes place.