Molly Burch

Molly Burch delivers yearning indie pop through a smoky voice shaped by the vocal era, girl groups, Brill Building pop, and the glossy synth textures of 1980s pop. Her 2017 debut, Please Be Mine, channeled infatuation, defiance, and despair, while her third album, 2021’s Romantic Images, shifted toward a brighter, pop-forward palette born from self-love rather than heartbreak and crafted alongside members of Tennis. Continuing that trajectory, her 2023 release Daydreamer carried an ’80s pop sheen under Wild Nothing’s production and drew inspiration from her own youthful diaries.

Born in Los Angeles to parents immersed in show business—her father worked as a writer and producer, her mother as a casting director—Burch absorbed classic film musicals and the recordings of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone from an early age, beginning to sing as a preteen. She later pursued jazz vocal performance at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, then moved to Austin, Texas, after graduation with the intention of writing original material and launching a career. There she reconnected with guitarist Dailey Toliver, a college acquaintance, and tracked most of her debut album in a single day at Dan Duszynski’s Dripping Springs studio, adding only light overdubs the next day. Captured Tracks issued the resulting collection of reverb-washed love songs, Please Be Mine, during Valentine’s Day week in 2017.

October 2018 brought the follow-up First Flower, another stylized yet more intimate set recorded in Austin with Erik Wofford, known for his work with Adam Torres and She Sir. In late 2019 she issued The Molly Burch Christmas Album, a set of twelve holiday songs—two of them originals—captured by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods and Will Patterson of Sleep Good. While touring with Tennis in 2020, Burch and her band, Toliver included, accepted an invitation to continue straight to Denver, where they worked with Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley on sessions that reshaped her sound around greater confidence and a mutual affinity for pop. The resulting synth- and dance-oriented Romantic Images appeared on Captured Tracks in mid-2021 and included a collaboration with Wild Nothing.

During a visit to her childhood home, Burch uncovered diaries she had kept at age thirteen and younger, prompting recollections of her shyness, romantic longing, and body dysmorphia alongside the moment she recognized her singing ability yet required encouragement to act on it. Those memories fueled the songs on her fourth album, Daydreamer, produced by Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum. By the time Captured Tracks released Daydreamer in September 2023, Burch had returned to Los Angeles from Austin, the two cities serving as the respective opening and closing points of the accompanying U.S. tour.