They’ve played with everyone from Lucinda Williams to a pre-fame Billie Eilish. Now, on their intensely personal new album, they confront the trauma of being pistol-whipped and dealing with an eating disorder
Lawrence Rothman has lived a lot of lives: in the early aughts, they performed under the name Lillian Berlin in the ultra-political hard rock band Living Things. They’ve been a model, posing with Kate Moss in a 2008 Roberto Cavalli ad; and with their wife, Floria Sigismondi, director of The Runaways, in i-D magazine. Kim Gordon, Lucinda Williams and a pre-fame Billie Eilish are just some of their collaborators. And on their debut solo album, 2017’s The Book of Law, they explored nine alter egos, each with distinct personas and visual identities, through flamboyant, off-kilter pop.
With the release of 2021’s Good Morning America, they switched gears into sun-scorched country, a mode that continues on their third album, The Plow That Broke the Plains: an intense, upsetting, starkly personal record. “To bear things inside of myself that are uncomfortable, it felt weirdly easier for me to do it in a singer-songwriter setting,” they say. “In an experimental setting, the lyric is hidden in math, and you haven’t purged it from yourself. I had a lot of purging I had to do on this record.”
