Ellicott City, MD · indie rock

Snail Mail

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Lindsey Jordan's guitar playing is the real draw — clean, unhurried lines under lyrics about wanting more than you got.

Lindsey Erin Jordan was born June 16, 1999, and raised in Ellicott City, Maryland, in a Roman Catholic household; her mother ran a lingerie store and her father worked for a textbook publisher. She began playing guitar at five, took classical lessons, and later played in her church band and her school's jazz band.

Seeing Paramore live at age eight was, by her own account, the moment that pushed her toward wanting to front a band. She started writing her own songs in seventh grade and began booking herself into restaurant and coffee-shop sets before she had finished high school.

Jordan first performed live as Snail Mail in 2015 at fifteen, backed by Ryan Vieira on bass and Shawn Durham on drums, and self-recorded an EP called Stick that year. A follow-up EP, Habit, released in 2016 through Sister Polygon after the band Priests took notice of her and brought her to the label; Pitchfork singled out its opening track, "Thinning."

After touring with Priests, Girlpool, Waxahatchee and Beach Fossils, Jordan signed with Matador Records in 2017 and performed a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR. Her debut album, Lush, followed in June 2018 to strong reviews, and she toured through 2019 with Mac DeMarco and Thundercat.

Snail Mail released a second album, Valentine, in 2021, and a third, Ricochet, in 2026. Jordan's guitar playing, melodic, largely unprocessed and built more from interlocking lines than power chords, remains the element most often singled out in writing about the project.

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indie rock