Into The Music
Lindsey Jordan was seventeen when she started playing solo guitar shows under the name Snail Mail in Baltimore. By the time she was twenty-two, her second album had landed on nearly every year-end list that mattered. None of this happened because Jordan chased a trend or figured out a formula. It happened because she writes songs about heartbreak and longing with a specificity and emotional weight that most artists don’t find until much later, if they find it at all.
Now she’s back on television, debuting “Tractor Beam” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this week, and the track is generating exactly the kind of response that makes Snail Mail fans feel quietly vindicated. Here is an artist who has never sounded like she was trying to fit anywhere, and somehow she keeps finding her way to the center of things.
Jordan grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, learning guitar and writing songs with a patience unusual for a teenager. Her early Bandcamp releases showed an ear for melody that was immediately striking, and her 2016 debut EP Habit gave the indie world its first real look at what she was building. When Lush arrived in 2018 on Matador Records, the reaction was swift and almost unanimous. Critics pointed to songs like “Pristine” and “heat wave” as examples of confessional songwriting at its sharpest, the kind of work that gets under your skin not because it’s clever but because it’s true.
Her 2021 follow-up Valentine went somewhere darker and stranger. Jordan had dealt with a serious illness in the years between albums, and the record carried that weight without turning it into the whole story. Lush production from Ben H. Allen gave the songs a dreamlike quality that was a genuine departure, and songs like “Ben Franklin” and “Madonna” showed Jordan stretching her melodic instincts into territory that surprised even devoted listeners.
“Tractor Beam” suggests the next chapter is going to pull in multiple directions at once. There’s a directness to it, a bluntness in the rhythm guitar and Jordan’s delivery, but the melody does something unexpectedly elliptical in the chorus. It’s the kind of song that rewards repeated listens, which has always been a Snail Mail specialty.
What’s easy to miss about Jordan is how singular her guitar playing actually is. She’s not a shredder, not a theorist, not someone chasing technique. But her rhythm work has an oddly hypnotic quality, and her leads, when she lets them appear, have a voice that’s immediately identifiable. You hear two seconds of a Snail Mail guitar line and you know exactly where you are.
The same is true of her voice. Jordan’s singing is conversational in the best sense, never overselling the emotion in a song but never hiding from it either. She’s been compared to everyone from Phoebe Bridgers to early Elliott Smith, but the comparisons eventually fall away because Jordan sounds like herself in a way that’s genuinely hard to imitate.
She’s taken her time between projects, and based on the response to “Tractor Beam,” that patience is being rewarded. There’s an audience that has been waiting, and it doesn’t sound like they’ll be waiting much longer.