If you only know Lizzy McAlpine from the TikTok-fueled explosion of "ceilings," you’re basically starting a book on the last chapter. There is this weird phenomenon where a viral moment flattens an artist's entire history into a single 15-second clip of someone running through the rain. Honestly, it’s a bit of a tragedy. Lizzy didn't just appear out of thin air in 2022. Long before the major label deals and the John Mayer collaborations, she was a college kid at Berklee writing some of the most gut-wrenching, technically proficient folk-pop you've ever heard.
Most people assume her "older" work starts with the album five seconds flat. It doesn't. To understand where the raw, live-recorded energy of her 2024 album Older comes from, you have to go back to the stuff she actually tried to scrub from the internet.
The Mystery of the Deleted Indigo EP
There’s this project called Indigo from 2018. If you look for it on Spotify or Apple Music today, it’s just... gone. Lizzy pulled it from major streaming services because she felt it didn't represent who she was becoming as an artist. You can still find the tracks on SoundCloud or buried in the dark corners of YouTube, but it’s essentially the "lost" era of lizzy mcalpine older songs.
It’s fascinating to listen to now. You hear a 19-year-old voice that is already incredibly controlled. The tracks—like "Honeydew" and "Are U Okay?"—are much more traditional indie-folk than the cinematic production she moved into later. It’s stripped-back. It’s raw. It’s a little bit "cottagecore" before that was even a buzzword people used to describe her aesthetic. For die-hard fans, these are the holy grail tracks. They show a songwriter who was already obsessed with internal rhyme schemes and unexpected melodic leaps, even when she was just recording in her dorm room.
Why artists delete their early work
It’s a control thing. When you’re growing as fast as she was, your old skin feels tight. She didn't want new fans' first impression to be a version of her that she had outgrown. But for the listener, Indigo is the blueprint. It’s where she learned how to make silence feel heavy.
The Spain Era: Give Me A Minute
In 2020, while the rest of the world was falling apart, Lizzy dropped Give Me A Minute. This is technically her debut studio album, though it feels more like a diary of her time studying abroad in Spain. It was released independently, which gave it this shimmering, intimate quality that’s hard to fake.
If you want to talk about lizzy mcalpine older songs that actually define her, you have to talk about "Pancakes for Dinner." It’s the quintessential Lizzy song. It’s about that specific, agonizing anxiety of liking someone and not knowing if they like you back. The lyrics aren't flowery or metaphorical; they’re literal. "I wanna buy you pancakes for dinner / I wanna find a way to make you mine."
There’s a reason this song became a sleeper hit. It feels like a secret.
✨ Don't miss: The Cast of The Quick and the Dead 1987: Why This Forgotten Western Still Hits Hard
Other standouts from this era:
- To the Mountains: A song about needing space that sounds like a literal breath of fresh air.
- Apple Pie: This one is basically a warm hug. It’s one of her few "happy" songs that doesn't feel cheesy.
- Over-the-Ocean Call (Andrew): A six-minute epic about long-distance relationships that features a real voice memo. It’s devastating.
- Headstones and Land Mines: A darker, more somber look at loss that showed she wasn't just writing about boys and pancakes.
The SoundCloud and Voice Memo Graveyard
Before the "official" albums, there was the SoundCloud era. This is where things get really interesting for the completionists. Lizzy used to post "Sunday Songs" and various snippets that never made it to an official tracklist.
Tracks like "30 days (voice memo)" capture a very specific moment in 2020. You can hear the room noise. You can hear her fingers sliding on the guitar strings. It’s "human-quality" in the most literal sense. These lizzy mcalpine older songs are often where she experimented with the vocal layering that would eventually become her signature sound. She’s a master of the "vocal stack," where she layers four or five harmonies on top of each other to create a wall of sound that feels like a choir made of one person.
Transitioning to the Mainstream
By the time five seconds flat arrived in 2022, the "older" sound was evolving. She started adding drums. She started adding distorted guitars. She started making short films to accompany the music. But even in the middle of all that high-budget production, you can still find the DNA of those early 2018-2020 tracks.
The song "chemtrails" from the 2022 album is a direct bridge. It’s a piano ballad about her late father, and it has that same vulnerability found on Give Me A Minute. It’s a reminder that no matter how big the stages get, she’s still that girl from Philadelphia who knows how to make you cry with three chords and a truth.
What most people get wrong about her "old" sound
The biggest misconception is that her early music was "simpler." It wasn't. If you actually look at the chord progressions in a song like "Means Something," they are jazz-influenced and incredibly complex. She was just hiding the complexity behind an acoustic guitar. She’s a Berklee-trained musician, after all. She knows exactly what she’s doing with those diminished chords.
How to listen to the back catalog today
If you’re trying to catch up on the lizzy mcalpine older songs you missed, don’t just hit "shuffle" on her top tracks. You’ll just get the hits.
- Start with the "When the World Stopped Moving" Live EP. It was recorded in one take and features some of the best versions of her Give Me A Minute tracks.
- Dig into the SoundCloud archive. Look for the "lm" playlist. It’s a time capsule of 2018-2020 Lizzy.
- Watch the early YouTube videos. Many of her "older" songs were first performed as "one-take" videos in her bedroom. Seeing her perform them live shows the technical skill that a studio recording sometimes polishes away.
Honestly, the best way to experience her evolution is to listen to Give Me A Minute and then immediately jump to her 2024 album Older. The contrast is wild. In the early stuff, she’s trying to hold onto everything. In the new stuff, she’s learning how to let go. Both versions are essential.
The next time "ceilings" comes on your playlist, let it finish, but then go find "Nothing / Sad N Stuff." You'll see what I mean. The growth isn't just in the production value; it's in the way she inhabits the space between the notes.
To truly appreciate her current trajectory, go back and listen to the Give Me A Minute album in its original chronological order to hear the narrative arc of her time in Spain.