One of the most vital behind-the-scenes forces in pop music today, Amy Allen has brought her massive songwriting talents to a steady stream of smash hits in the first few months of 2024 alone. At a time when she’s lighting up the charts with her contributions to songs like Sabrina Carpenter’s culture-dominating “Espresso,” the Maine-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist is now taking a monumental new step with the release of her self-titled debut album—a body of work revealing an entirely new dimension of her one-of-a-kind artistry, offering a candidly detailed glimpse into the emotional life of a Billboard Hot 100 hitmaker who’s worked with superstars like Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, and Leon Bridges and won an Album of the Year Grammy for her work on Harry Styles’ Harry’s House. Centered on a gorgeously composed and endlessly unpredictable form of indie-rock, Amy Allen introduces an essential new artist with a rare balance of sensitivity, self-aware wit, and deep-rooted willingness to share the raw truth of her experience.
The latest milestone in a journey that began with joining her first band at age eight and composing her first song at ten—and later included such landmark moments as studying with legendary industry veteran Kara DioGuardi as a college student—Amy Allen marks the triumphant outcome of a lifetime devoted to the intricate art of songwriting. “My main goal with my first album was to take the time to craft songs that were so honest and authentic that they’d still carry the same weight for me years from now,” says Allen. “That can be hard to do when you’re writing for other people all the time, because you don’t really have a say in what ends up getting used. This album was a way to hold onto my artistry, and put songs out into the world that I can listen back to with my kids and grandkids in 60 years or so and still feel completely connected to every word.”
Made with producers including Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty), John Hill (Sylvan Esso, Cage the Elephant), and Eg White (Florence + the Machine, Adele), Amy Allen inhabits a kaleidoscopic sound suited to a music obsessive whose inspirations range from the Cocteau Twins’ enigmatic dream-pop to John Prine’s wistful country-folk. On the album-opening “darkside,” she delivers an otherworldly piece of alt-pop layered with shadowy beats and spellbinding strings, presenting a poetic meditation on “learning to show your true self to someone you love, and how that can be painful and beautiful at the same time.” A deeply expressive guitarist, Allen shifts into sweetly lilting folk on “reason 2 forgive” and its tender contemplation of the slippery line between compassion and self-sacrifice. One of the most bittersweet tracks on Amy Allen, “the american” unfolds in woozy textures and delicate piano melodies, perfectly capturing the haze of memory as she looks back on an old love with equal parts stunning clarity and dreamy nostalgia. And on “even forever,” Allen muses on impermanence and taps into her decades of experience in rock bands, arriving at a gloriously cathartic anthem propelled by explosive rhythms and wildly shimmering riffs.
In bringing her full-length debut to life, Allen gathered and developed songs over the course of two years, carefully embedding her lyrics with the type of lived-in and hyper-specific detail that immediately draws the listener deep into her world—or, as she puts it, “songs so personal there’s no way I could ever give them to anyone else.” To that end, she points to the writing of a song called “girl with a problem” as the first pivotal step in the album’s creation. Rooted in Allen’s brooding guitar riffs, the darkly hypnotic track serves as a shining example of her distinct lyrical sensibilities, merging plainspoken confession, off-kilter humor, and beautifully strange poetry to mesmerizing effect (e.g., “Keep pulling me in like the moon manhandles the tides/Creep into my intimate thoughts when I close my eyes/I don’t subscribe to star signs/But nothing happens for no reason/Must’ve been a higher power talking/When you crashed into my lips”). “That song is about how even though I have so many pieces of my life together, I still have this tendency to fall for the wrong people and then keep holding on,” says Allen. “The lyrics are conversational and written from a place of sort of joking with myself, but they’re also talking about something very painful and real. As soon as it came together, I knew what I wanted this album to feel like.”
All throughout the album, Allen imbues her storytelling with an unguarded honesty that has much to do with the nature of her songwriting process. “When I write for myself I almost always begin with a poem, which is exactly the way I first fell in love with writing when I was little,” she says. From a young age, Allen honed her narrative voice by dissecting the songs of Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, and other iconic artists she discovered through her dad. “We lived about an hour away from school, and my dad used all that time in the car to school me on classic rock,” she says. “I remember wanting to know why some songs made me so emotional, and studying their lyrics to try to figure that out.” After spending her formative years playing in various bands (including her sister’s all-girl rock group), Allen headed to Berklee School of Music and founded a band of her own, then moved to New York City with her bandmates post-graduation. Although the band quickly drew interest from record labels, Allen made the tough decision to step back and double down on sharpening her craft. Thanks in part to a serendipitous meeting with songwriting heavyweight Scott Harris (Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber), she soon began landing cuts with major artists like Selena Gomez and Camila Cabello. “Right away I loved working with different people and learning about different genres and song structure and voice, and then going home and using everything I learned to write a song for myself,” says Allen. Through the years, she’s brought her whip-smart lyrical skills and undeniable melodic sense to an ever-growing list of hits—including tracks from the likes of Halsey, Tate McRae, Justin Timberlake, Rosé of BLACKPINK, and many more—and earned a nomination for the inaugural Songwriter of the Year at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Arriving soon after the mind-blowing back-to-back success of “Espresso” and Carpenter’s follow-up single “Please Please Please”—two Billboard Hot 100 top five hits co-written by Allen—her debut album ultimately fulfills a certain intention she’s long kept close to her heart. “What I’ve always loved most about songwriting is that it lets me take everything happening inside me and express it in a way that’s hard to actually speak out loud,” Allen says. “In so many of these songs I’m talking about things I don’t even talk about with my friends, so the idea of putting them out into the world is definitely scary. But as a songwriter, my North Star is to make other people feel seen and held, emotionally speaking. The more I can really dig into what I’m feeling, the more it’ll cut through and end up having a real impact on somebody else.”
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