Lizzy McAlpine - five seconds flat

Lizzy McAlpine's five seconds flat is the 2022 album that made her a songwriter everyone wanted to talk about, full of diaristic heartbreak and sudden, cinematic swells.

Arriving two years after her debut, Give Me a Minute, it widened her world considerably and found a far bigger audience. The songs are still intimate, sung close to the microphone, but the arrangements stretch out into lush harmonies and unexpected emotional detours. It is the sound of a songwriter discovering she can make small feelings sound enormous.

Ceilings became the album's quiet phenomenon, a hazy daydream of a love song with a twist ending that sent listeners straight back to the start. Doomsday opens the record with a wry, gentle unease, Erase Me brings in Jacob Collier for a tense and gorgeous duet, and Hate to Be Lame pairs her with FINNEAS, a natural match for her blend of vulnerability and dry humor.

Throughout, McAlpine writes with startling specificity, the kind of lines that feel lifted straight from a late-night text thread or a voice memo recorded in the car.

For fans who found her through Ceilings, this is the full picture, and on vinyl it plays like a short film about falling apart and putting yourself back together.