Lilly Hiatt will release Forever on January 31, 2025 via New West Records. The 9-song set is Hiatt’s first album in four years and was produced by her husband, Coley Hinson, and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies, Hole). Forever is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer-songwriter sensitivity. It is a bold, guitar-driven, exploration of maturity and adulthood that grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love, and the songs are intensely vulnerable, full of diaristic snapshots.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Tennessee, Hiatt first earned buzz with a pair of early solo records before breaking out with 2017’s Trinity Lane. That record helped her earn dates with the likes of John Prine, Drive-By Truckers, Margo Price, and more. NPR called it “courageous and affecting,” while Rolling Stone hailed it as “the most cohesive and declarative statement of the young songwriter’s career.” Hiatt delivered on the album’s promise with her similarly acclaimed 2020 follow-up, Walking Proof, and unable to tour due to the pandemic, quickly returned to the studio again for 2021’s stripped-down Lately, which Uncut proclaimed to be “captivating.” When it was finally time to get back on the road, though, she found herself feeling overwhelmed and bewildered. The world seemed to be changing faster than she could keep up with, and rather than embracing what should have been her triumphant return, Hiatt instead began retreating from everything she’d worked so hard to build. “I was on the phone with a friend who said she wasn’t sure where I’d been,” Hiatt recalls. “I realized I wasn’t too sure of that either.” The search for answers—where she’s been, who she’s become, what it all means—lies at the heart of Hiatt’s striking Forever.
“I fell in love, got married, adopted a dog, all the things I’d always dreamed of doing,” Hiatt reflects. “But I felt like an outsider watching myself stumble through it all, just constantly critiquing myself to the point where I became so paralyzed I could hardly leave home.” She tried therapy and antidepressants, talked to friends and family, wrote dozens and dozens of songs about her feelings, all in the hopes of quieting her racing mind. “There was this intensity where I felt so jacked up all the time,” she explains. “Eventually I just realized that my life was passing me by, that the love I was living in required presence to accept. So I started doing the little things you have to do to show up for the people in your life: listen, grow, change. I learned to expand my world.” Hiatt left the bustle of Nashville for a more rural setting just outside the city and scrapped all the material she’d been working on, starting from scratch in pursuit of something that would resonate more with the new chapter she was embarking upon.
Hiatt and Hinson worked quickly in their new home, tackling the writing and recording of each song one-at-a-time from the ground up and sending the material off to Kolderie to mix as they finished them. “Paul brought so much enthusiasm and dimension to the project,” Hiatt explains. “Every time we had a song tracked, we’d share it with him and then he’d get really excited about it, which was really affirming and encouraged us to turn right around and get started on the next one.” That excitement is plain to hear on Forever.
Today, SPIN premiered the video for the album’s first single, the driving “Shouldn’t Be.” The song meditates on the universal need to stand in your beliefs without requiring the validation of others. Hiatt says, “I wrote ‘Shouldn’t Be’ after a Mudhoney concert and it was the first song I recorded for the album. I was also thinking a little of Olivia Rodrigo when writing it. It’s a song about standing in your truth.”
SHARE LILLY HIATT’S “SHOULDN’T BE” DIRECTED BY JOSHUA SHOEMAKER
Lilly Hiatt’s Forever will be available across digital retailers, on compact disc, and standard black vinyl. A limited, clear green color edition autographed by Lilly Hiatt as well as an autographed compact disc edition will be available at Independent Retailers and can be pre-ordered NOW via NEW WEST RECORDS.
Lilly Hiatt Forever Track Listing:
1. Hidden Day
2. Shouldn’t Be
3. Ghost Ship
4. Somewhere
5. Evelyn’s House
6. Forever
7. Man
8. Kwik-E-Mart
9. Thoughts
