Biography
Canadian producer, singer, and songwriter Lydia Ainsworth absorbed both mainstream pop and avant-garde classical textures during childhood, with a musician father and a mother employed as a set designer. Upon finishing her studies in film scoring, she expanded preliminary sketches into her earliest collection of spare, electronically driven pieces that carried an exploratory edge. Over later projects her approach shifted toward greater accessibility, culminating in the sleek and radio-friendly dark pop of the 2021 release Sparkles & Debris.
While attending McGill University in Montreal, Ainsworth began shaping her initial solo material from short audio recordings she had captured on campus. Balancing residences in Toronto and Brooklyn, she spent several years refining tracks that drew equally from her affinity for atmospheric, lesser-known styles and her formal training in composition and orchestration. As a self-taught cellist she wove string lines and vocal fragments around minimal, unsettling electronic pulses, creating dense choral textures that thickened the arrangements. Her first full-length effort, Right from Real, surfaced in 2015 via Arbutus Records; the album earned a Juno Award nomination in the best electronic album category and also appeared on the Polaris Prize shortlist. Two years afterward she issued Darling of the Afterglow through Arbutus and Bella Union, steering the songs toward conventional pop phrasing and rhythmic patterns. Extensive touring followed, including co-bills with Perfume Genius and numerous headline dates.
Phantom Forest, released in 2019, extended this trajectory into still more mainstream territory, departing further from the fractured experimentalism of earlier recordings. To support the album Ainsworth prepared four remixed versions that pared the originals back to their essential melodies before layering intricate string additions. Later that same year her collaboration with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, titled “Earth Song,” appeared in the season finale of Stranger Things’ third installment on Netflix. Ainsworth devoted the subsequent two years to preparing her fourth album, Sparkles & Debris. For this project she moved beyond solitary production methods, enlisting additional musicians and engineers to incorporate live instrumentation alongside her sample-based foundations. The record reached stores in May 2021.
While attending McGill University in Montreal, Ainsworth began shaping her initial solo material from short audio recordings she had captured on campus. Balancing residences in Toronto and Brooklyn, she spent several years refining tracks that drew equally from her affinity for atmospheric, lesser-known styles and her formal training in composition and orchestration. As a self-taught cellist she wove string lines and vocal fragments around minimal, unsettling electronic pulses, creating dense choral textures that thickened the arrangements. Her first full-length effort, Right from Real, surfaced in 2015 via Arbutus Records; the album earned a Juno Award nomination in the best electronic album category and also appeared on the Polaris Prize shortlist. Two years afterward she issued Darling of the Afterglow through Arbutus and Bella Union, steering the songs toward conventional pop phrasing and rhythmic patterns. Extensive touring followed, including co-bills with Perfume Genius and numerous headline dates.
Phantom Forest, released in 2019, extended this trajectory into still more mainstream territory, departing further from the fractured experimentalism of earlier recordings. To support the album Ainsworth prepared four remixed versions that pared the originals back to their essential melodies before layering intricate string additions. Later that same year her collaboration with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, titled “Earth Song,” appeared in the season finale of Stranger Things’ third installment on Netflix. Ainsworth devoted the subsequent two years to preparing her fourth album, Sparkles & Debris. For this project she moved beyond solitary production methods, enlisting additional musicians and engineers to incorporate live instrumentation alongside her sample-based foundations. The record reached stores in May 2021.
Albums
Singles
