“As soon as I saw her live that first time, it just clicked—like, oh, she’s definitely going somewhere,” says Murphy, referring to a performance that can still be found in part on YouTube, where Jordan, on a cherry-red Fender, howls low, gritty, gargantuan vocals up into the Ottobar rafters. “It was just that mix of raw talent and the fact that you could immediately tell she considered herself a serious musician.”

WTMD radio host Sam Sessa heard the same thing when he discovered Jordan while searching for new music on Bandcamp, the online music platform where so many young artists self-release their songs. “It’s like walking into a swamp with a metal detector—a lot of rusty nails, but every once in a while, you find a real gem,” says Sessa, who played the first Snail Mail song on 89.7 FM in May 2016, two months before the release of their Habit EP, with its defining single, “Thinning,” written when Jordan was just 15. “Lindsey has a way of tapping into feelings and experiences and channeling them into her music in a way that’s so rare, especially for someone her age. It is just instantly relatable. It strikes a chord with people.”

By the time the station invited her in for a live show the following spring, Jordan, now a bleach-blonde high school senior, had already toured with D.C.’s post-punk Priests and performed at the SXSW festival, flanked by friends-turned-bandmates, bassist Alex Bass and drummer Ray Brown. An NPR Tiny Desk Concert and a Matador Records deal were not too far behind.

“She’d already become indie famous—it happened that fast for her,” says Sessa, who remembers label scouts in the Towson studio’s sold-out audience. “And less than a year later, The New York Times is calling her a rock star.”

“It kind of just came out of nowhere,” says Jordan. “I was a high schooler. I had plans to go to college. I wanted to write. I was kind of not thinking about it like, ‘Oh man, this is going to be my career.’... Then there started being label and manager and agent offers, and finally there were resources to record. It was super overwhelming, but also the most exciting thing—ever.”

In 2017, she got her high school diploma, Bass and Brown dropped out of college, and the trio got to work on their debut album, Lush. Rave reviews poured in for its 10 tight, triumphant tracks, lauded for their wise-beyond-years lyrics and reverberating guitar, cementing Snail Mail’s status as the next great indie-rock darling. Jordan was hailed a “prodigy” on more than one occasion.

This was a time when a number of young female musicians had begun climbing the ranks of rock ‘n’ roll. That fall, Jordan was included in a Times feature titled “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled By Women,” which declared that a new generation of “female bands are making some of the most urgent, politically relevant music around,” including other indie artists like Soccer Mommy, Sheer Mag, Vagabon, and Waxahatchee, who Jordan considers a friend and mentor. As Sessa says, Jordan seemed like “the tip of the spear.”

But from a flash in the 1970s punk scene to the trailblazing Lilith Fair era of the 1990s, this wasn’t the first time that tastemakers had mused about the future being female for a genre forged by men in the 1950s.

In fact, a 2018 University of Southern California study sent shockwaves throughout the music industry when it reported that, of the top songs on the Billboard Hot 100 over the last six years, a mere 22.4 percent were performed by women (with only 12.3 percent written and 2 percent produced by them). That awards season sparked the hashtag #GrammysSoMale and record labels promised change, but when new figures came out last spring, they remained largely the same, if not worse. Today, only 7.7 percent of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees are women, and the disparities leave female musicians frustrated over the persistent focus on their gender.

“There’s a lot of ‘You go, girl!’ energy out there right now, and, in a way, it’s kind of infantilizing,” Jordan told us in 2018. “It puts forth this idea that girls are born with an actual disadvantage. In music, young girls are not encouraged to play the guitar, and I definitely grew up in gaggles of boys, struggling to figure out what it meant to me to be a musician and a guitar player and where I stood in the equation.”

Jordan’s music spoke for itself, with Lush landing the band opening gigs for veteran indie artists such as Kurt Vile, Mac DeMarco, and Parquet Courts, plus a spot on the Coachella lineup and their own world tour. She had already started writing songs for Snail Mail’s second record when COVID-19 hit in 2020, sending her back to her childhood bedroom, where she read books, played Xbox, and fleshed out melodies on a new Minilogue synthesizer for much of the pandemic.

JORDAN PHOTOGRAPHED FOR VALENTINE, COURTESY MATADOR RECORDS; SNAIL MAIL PERFORMING AT U+NFEST IN 2015; A POSTER FROM THE BAND’S WTMD CONCERT IN 2017, ILLUSTRATED BY BALTIMORE ARTIST ALEX FINE.

“All of a sudden, I had all this time—and quiet,” says Jordan, who found herself working through the night, delving deeper into themes of love, loss, and life-changing success. “I’m superstitious about the fact that I’ve basically written all of my albums in that room. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, like, shocker! Of course I’m writing my best songs here at my parents' house.”

During this time, she also spent 45 days in an Arizona rehab, which she references on the record’s bass-heavy second single, “Ben Franklin.” While private about the circumstances, she alludes to the navigational challenges of sudden fame at such a young age. “I just had a lot of really crazy experiences in the year leading up to it,” says Jordan. “I needed very distinct professionals to know what I was going through; people around me were like, ‘I don’t know how to help you, dude.’ . . . Entering into something like this, I was nervous, I felt depleted, disappointed about a lot of things in the music industry. I was getting a little negative.... I have a way different mindset now, and the mental health education of, like, a junior professor.”

Which can’t hurt, as Jordan admits to putting an “inhuman” amount of pressure on herself. The self-proclaimed perfectionist refuses ghost writers, has a heavy hand in production, and conceptualizes her own music videos, like Valentine’s title track Victorian bloodbath, inspired in part by her love of horror films. She taps into an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture—be it cinema (her album cover was originally going to be an ode to John Waters’ Cry-Baby before pop star Billie Eilish released hers featuring a single tear), music (from Bill Evans to Nirvana), or literature (like Ocean Vuong or E.E. Cummings)—and incorporates it, and every decision, into her music with great intention. Her diction is deliberate, her chord arrangements meticulous, all shades of a five-year-old who forced herself to practice guitar for two full hours every day.