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Lizzy McAlpine on the power and pitfalls of viral fame.

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

"Older" eschews the melodramatic swooning of McAlpine's previous album.

In 2022, the singer and songwriter Lizzy McAlpine released her second studio album, “Five Seconds Flat,” a collection of winsome bedroom pop songs about feeling heartsick and alienated. McAlpine, who was then twenty-two, seemed to fit neatly between Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo, two other visionary young songwriters who became enormously famous during the pandemic. McAlpine’s work was funny and forthright, but also vaguely elegiac. She has a velvety, agile voice that trembles in the right moments. She is also unusually adept at writing the sorts of tender, yearning hooks that move legions of aspiring warblers to pull out their iPhone tripods. McAlpine had collaborated with Jacob Collier and Finneas on the record, and would soon work with Noah Kahan and Niall Horan. She felt like a singer of her time and place.

Almost a year after “Five Seconds Flat” was released, the single “Ceilings” went viral on TikTok. McAlpine, who was brought up in a suburb of Philadelphia, wrote the song while she was in London, working on an EP and muddling through a breakup. It tells the story of a relationship’s heady and intoxicating early days, when everything feels possible but the ground is still unsteady. The song’s narrator bites her tongue rather than confessing devotion too soon: “I don’t wanna ruin the moment / Lovely to sit between comfort and chaos.” Much of McAlpine’s writing wobbles between those two poles. Like Bridgers and Rodrigo, she is prone to contemplating the distance between what feels safe and what feels thrilling.