London-based, Wrexham-raised artist and producer Art School Girlfriend is releasing her third studio album, ‘Lean In’, on March 11th via Fiction Records. She will perform these new tracks for the first time on a UK headline tour, which opens up here in Brighton at the Dust venue on 7th April courtesy of FORM promoters.
Tickets are on general sale now from HERE.
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
Armed with the freedom and space to experiment, ‘Lean In’ was self-produced in her own East London studio and sees Art School Girlfriend set to move from cult bedroom artist to one of the UK’s most vital artist/producers operating at the moment, tackling alternative rock, electronic pop and experimental ambient sounds in her most cohesive work to date.
In September 2025, Art School Girlfriend shared the single ‘L.Y.A.T.T.’, a shoegaze and techno-tinged meditation on love that received strong support across BBC Radio 1, Radio 6 Music, Spotify and Apple Music. In contrast, her second single ‘The Peaks’ brims with restless energy. The first spitting, galloping bars of the glitch-laden beat sound like the very sonic manifestation of zoning in and psyching up with a kind of crystalline gutpunch.
‘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 sh*t 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 Sh*t.” 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.
