Eliza Edens

On Eliza Edens’ new album Death Drive, the New York-based artist finds themselves at the white-hot intersection of pain and pleasure. In the midst of losing their mother to dementia, they had also begun exploring their queerness for the first time in their late twenties. Grief and desire coalesced into a fireball that sent them into a state of unmooring. “It was an intense time,” Edens says. “As I was watching my mom fade, I was also embracing a more reckless and bold side of myself in terms of identity.” The album gets its name from Freud’s theory of the “death drive,” which proposes that there is an innate human instinct towards recklessness and self-destruction in order to release tension–we smoke, we drive fast cars, we blow off steam at the bar. For Edens, this state of parallel pain and pleasure fused together with their creative impulses to create the confident, heartfelt Death Drive–their biggest and boldest album yet. Eliza, a native of Williamstown brings their full-band to celebrate this homecoming, and the release of Death Drive. Opening guest, Alisa Amador: Praised by NPR’s Bob Boilen as a “powerful voice whose tender performance commands attention and fosters connection,” Alisa Amador made history in 2022 with the first-ever Spanish language song to win the prestigious Tiny Desk Contest. Now, the bilingual singer/songwriter is formally introducing herself with her stunning full-length debut, Multitudes. Recorded with co-producers Tyler Chester and Daniel Radin, the album is a bold, captivating self-portrait, one that serves not only as a testament to how far Amador has come (she’s earned dates with everyone from Hozier and Brandi Carlile to Lake Street Dive and Maggie Rogers) but also as a celebration of where she comes from (her roots span Puerto Rico, New Mexico, Argentina, and New England). Slipping effortlessly between Spanish and English and featuring appearances from Gaby Moreno, Madison Cunningham, and Quinn Christopherson, the collection is raw and vulnerable, at once steeped in devastating loss and uncertainty, but also laced with the hope and resilience of a young woman learning to find her voice and stand her ground. Certainly, Multitudes is a beautiful record—the way Amador’s crystalline voice cuts through the album’s lush synthesizers, dreamy guitars, and cinematic string arrangements is nothing short of spellbinding—but more than that, it’s a fierce work of discovery and affirmation, a profound, revelatory meditation on triumph and loss, endings and beginnings, identity and belonging.