Music Review Show

What does it mean to lean in? Not to your career, not to the algorithm but to the act of making music itself? Polly Mackey, the artist, musician, songwriter and producer behind Art School Girlfriend, nearly walked away from releasing music altogether. Instead, she built a studio in East London, completed a Master's thesis on how electronic music can feel human, and made Lean In, her third album, out now on Fiction Records. It might be the most emotionally honest thing she's made. In this conversation, Polly and Sean talk about why she's drawn to the emotional geography between shoegaze and electronic music, the Ableton water-simulation plugins that shaped the record's sound, and what it felt like to study her own creative process while writing the songs. They also get into the bigger questions: Is the album format in crisis? Who actually benefits when music is "democratised"? And what happens to the music industry when the barrier to entry used to be £350 rent in Dalston? Plus: Polly's memories of trying to b