London-based, Wrexham-raised artist and producer Art School Girlfriend has announced her third studio album Lean In, due on the 11th of March via Fiction Records. She also shares new track ‘The Peaks’, and announces a 2026 run of headline dates.
‘The Peaks’ scale heights with reverberating glitches and crystaline synth lines, Mackey’s enveloping and rich vocals are ripe with longing and instilled with a clear-eyed intent to keep going, despite the forces that push against you. It’s evocative textures and rising soundscape, mirror the rugged landscapes bent by natural forces, the unparalleled production born from time, space and expertise, the lyrics exploring the tension of, in Mackey’s words, ‘desperately wanting to stay alive for the people you love’; the darkness, the light and the twitching singular beats, with undercurrents of bass and spindling guitar motifs. Haunting and determined, a mantra for determination despite the darkness.
Armed with the freedom and space to experiment, Lean In was self-produced in her own East London studio. In September, Art School Girlfriend shared the single L.Y.A.T.T., a techno-tinged meditation on love.
Lean In arrives at a time where her audience has grown exponentially, partly due to her diverse involvement across the music scene at large – contributions to the work of Daniel Avery, Lane 8, Jasper Tygner and Ghostpoet; being chosen by Bonobo to DJ at his Outliers series at Drumsheds; touring the US with both The Japanese House and Marika Hackman; a notable DJ set for HOR; producing and engineering for up-and-coming post-rock band Pencil; the tastemaker curation of her 5-years-in-the-running monthly radio show on Foundation FM.
Mackey speaks of making Lean In whilst feeling ‘a lot of things in parallel: grief, joy, love, anxiety, hopelessness, hopefulness, the effects of age, capitalism, technology’. Riding these parallelisms beyond binary collapse was both a key theme and a key to ASG’s process for the album. This is music made to listen to on headphones, while turning you outward to what’s important in the world — loved ones, natural spaces, and connection. It’s music that makes you lose your shit dancing — but in the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep for anxiety. ‘The album is very existential. Over the last few years, I’ve experienced for the first time what people call “Big Life Shit.” Everything in life had been distilled down to its purest essence, and it terrified me to see it so purely because it just felt so incredibly precious and fragile. It’s the price you pay for having lots of amazing things to care about.’
Self-producing, writing and recording Lean In, Mackey invites the listener to quite literally lean into the world she has built around her. With every detail intentional, this new record is less of a honing of her trademark sound of emotional blend of electronic sounds and shoegaze, and more of an expansion of it. At the top of next year, she will perform these new tracks for the first time on a UK headline tour, with tickets available to subscribers of her mailing list from Friday 21st Nov. Sign up here for first access. Tickets go on general sale from Fri 28th Nov.
Art School Girlfriend 2026 Live Dates:
April 7th – Dust, Brighton
April 8th – Colour Factory, London
April 9th – Strange Brew, Bristol
April 10th – Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
April 15th – Brudenell, Leeds
April 16th – Gorilla, Manchester
Art School Girlfriend – Lean In
Photo credit: Zak Watson (@zak_watson)
