A vocalist and composer whose warmly confessional style fuses folk-pop, jazz, and R&B, Lizzy McAlpine broke through to a wide audience in 2020 when her well-received first album, Give Me a Minute, appeared. Her second full-length release, Five Seconds Flat, entered the Billboard 200 in 2022, while Older followed in 2024; both records meditate on romantic dissolution.
Born in Philadelphia, she began composing during middle school and arrived at Berklee College of Music already fluent in song craft. Drawing from artists such as Dodie, H.E.R., and John Mayer, she issued the EP Indigo in 2018. Two years afterward she delivered Give Me a Minute, recorded with producer and multi-instrumentalist Philip Etherington; the reflective, close-up folk-pop set accumulated millions of streams and drew admiration from FINNEAS, Phoebe Bridgers, and Shawn Mendes. In 2021 she captured an eight-song acoustic performance drawn from her widely followed social-media performances on When the World Stopped Moving: The Live EP.
Five Seconds Flat, her fourteen-track sophomore album, emerged in 2022. Written in the aftermath of a painful split, the expansive work climbed to number five on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, propelled by the streaming successes “Doomsday” and “All My Ghosts” along with appearances by FINNEAS and Jacob Collier. After recording with Noah Kahan and Niall Horan, she issued the title track “Older” in February 2024 as the lead single for her third studio album. Co-produced by McAlpine and Mason Stoops, with additional contributions from Ryan Lerman, Jeremy Most, and Tony Berg, Older reached stores in April 2024 and continued her examination of heartbreak and personal maturation following a breakup; the set peaked at number 93 on the Billboard 200 and featured the single “I Guess.”
