“Hyper-real, intimate but a bit removed,” is the vocal effect Polly Mackey sought on Lean In, her third album as Art School Girlfriend. It’s a daydreaming distance she successfully achieves by singing into a dynamic mic over sophisticated, shoegazey layers of looped synths.
This subtle, supple sound can, at best, sweep the listener up on a magic carpet ride, gaining the empowering perspective of audio altitude on their own emotions. At worst, it can find its elegantly constructed patterns dissolving into the background like a guided meditation. Similarly, its stated themes of “grief, joy, love, anxiety, hopelessness, hopefulness, age, capitalism and technology” can certainly send you floating – or spiraling – off at tangents.
“Am I doing it for you?” Mackey asks gently in a refrain on the opening track, “Doing Laps”. It’s almost as though she’s singing to herself rather than posing the question to another. Splashy synth notes scatter across the slow-build tune, while a beat twitches in a seemingly random pattern that becomes quirkily moreish as Mackey’s question hangs in the air.
This all makes sense when you learn the Wrexham-raised artist wrote the record during a period of professional indecision. Although her last tour had been a sell-out, she was considering giving up her public-facing persona and retreating more deeply into production while building her own studio. Since her beginnings with previous shoegaze band Deaf Club, it’s been clear that Mackey is most comfortable protecting the privacy of her songs in a cocoon of sound. Electronic music, perhaps, is her ivory tower.
But she comes bursting out of that cocoon with the giddy house pulse of the album’s second track, “L.Y.A.T.T.” (Love You All The Time). The danceable positivity of the track hymns the security of love in unstable times. “On the days that we don't speak that much at all,” Mackey sings. “When your mind is moving somewherе I can't go/ It's a kick inside that's deep enough to know/ I know that I love you all the time.”
Similar assurances, anchored by a gothic sludge of electric guitar, underpin the “The Peaks”, with its simple chorus assurances of, “I won’t leave”. Mackey’s relationship with indie folk singer/songwriter Marika Hackman (who she married in 2024) has been described as “the stuff of gay indie pop legend”; fans will surely rejoice at this possible insight into their life together.
Textural pleasures on offer include the tapping, ASMR percussion of “Lines”; the pretty, revolving reverberations of “The Field” and the melding of piano, vocoder and crunchy, zingy effects of “Framer”. Although Mackey’s voice is lovely, you wonder if she could do more than use it as a sort of ghostly pillow. This album gives us plenty of space, but at times the listener can feel cut adrift, grasping for more identity from the songs. For the most part, though, Mackey offers a safe space to shift perspectives and process ideas without making it about her. Generous, intelligent and occasionally evasive stuff.
