By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring Liz Cooper’s confident art pop transformation NEW DAY, out now via Sleepyhead Records!
Liz Cooper – NEW DAY
Genre: Art Pop, Punk, Indie Rock
Favorite Tracks: “New Day,” “Better Than Ever,” “Boy Toy,” “Baby Steps”
Liz Cooper is maybe the coolest sounding motherfucker in indie rock right now. Her career to date has traversed plenty of sounds and identities, starting with and evolving from the elastic desert Americana she was initially drafting with her band the Stampede. And while that sound suited Cooper just fine, the recent solo material, starting with 2021’s HOT SASS and continuing in a big way here with NEW DAY, finds Cooper taking on the role of emboldened queer rock star. Channeling more Kim Gordon than, say, Lucinda Williams, like the title implies you can feel NEW DAY at every turn acting as a new form of expression and identity—a chance to tap into and explore a new sense of self. And the Liz Cooper on this album? She’s cool as fuck.
The groovy low end bounce on the opening title track finds Cooper laser focused, fusing biting New York art punk with pleasing pop rhythms; there’s a bit of Stef Chura, a bit of Colleen Green, a bit of Pip Blom, take your pick of great rockers who have (unjustly) flown just slightly under the radar in traditional “indie rock” conversations over the last decade. But NEW DAY is constantly finding ways to make Cooper feel like a bonafide weirdo rocker, both larger and life and hard to pin down—almost antithetical to the notion and mission of the Americana music she began in. While it was something HOT SASS certainly laid the groundwork for with songs like “Motorcycle” and “Slice of LIfe,” NEW DAY is both tighter and stranger in the best ways, a full expression of this re-presented star turning identity. It makes sense learning that standout “Boy Toy” was the first track her and producer Dan Molad recorded for the record: “Let’s make a fun song that’s just super direct and sexy and big,” she says in the liner notes. “It felt so powerful and free to start there. There’s so much heaviness for me around this record—it was nice to start with something fresh and fun.” The buzzsawing guitars and exhaustive pianos engulf her as she howls “I’ll be your boy toy,” this dizzying new wave sound matching the slick sunglassed close up on the album cover.
Elsewhere the propulsive percussive drive pushing “Changes,” with these skittering, cinematic strings spiraling down the production, taps perfectly into the mysterious but confident landscape NEW DAY embodies. Liz Cooper has spent the last decade continually reinventing, and NEW DAY feels like the culmination of that soul searching. Check it out on Bandcamp.
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