The Art School Girlfriend comeback: Could there be a future release called ‘Lean Out’?
There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes in music that most of us will never see: arguments, label tussles, bust-ups glimpsed only through grainy paparazzi shots.
Many artists will never draw back the curtain on their private lives intentionally, but in the build-up to the release of her recent record Lean In, Wrexham-born musician Art School Girlfriend has done exactly that, primarily because it’s a record she never planned on making; in fact, she wasn’t planning on releasing anything at all.
“Last year, I decided that I would stop releasing music altogether”, Polly Louise Mackey, the artist behind the stage name, wrote in a Facebook post announcing the album in late November 2025, before adding, “I continued going to my studio and making music purely for the way it allows my brain access a different plane and way of being; for the process over the outcome. That decision unlocked a period of intense creativity like I’ve never experienced before; I got obsessed and very existential.”
The result is Lean In, an accidental brain-child of an album born from this burst of creativity, which will drop on March 11th of this year. Self-produced in her own east London studio, she says it was the deep sense of safety the space offered her that armed her with the freedom and comfort to begin experimenting again: “This is the sound of me going deeper, being filled with questions I don’t have the answer to, but maybe figuring out what the point of life is afforded by a studio of one’s own and those around me”, says Mackey.
In the process of making Lean In, Art School Girlfriend says she felt “a lot of things in parallel: grief, joy, love, anxiety, hopelessness, hopefulness, the effects of age, capitalism, technology”. We’re told that these parallelisms, and the idea of existing beyond binaries, are what emerge as the album’s key themes. Lean In is music designed for introspective, late-night headphone listening, yet it also urges the listener to look outwards, reaching towards what truly matters: loved ones, natural spaces, and human connection.
Mackey adds, “The album is very existential. Over the last few years, I’ve experienced for the first time what people call ‘big life shit’. Everything in life had been distilled down to its purest essence, and it terrified me to see it so purely because it just felt so incredibly precious and fragile. It’s the price you pay for having lots of amazing things to care about.”
Mackey has put out four releases to date, starting with 2021’s Is It Light Where You Are, and subsequent annual follow-ups in the form of Is It Dark Where You Are, Hard Landing and Soft Landing. With Lean In, those of us who enjoy a wee speculate every now and then must ask the question: Will there be a new album called Lean Out?
Given that Mackey was ready to walk away from music altogether, it wouldn’t be surprising if Lean In sees her break free of any binaries that have shaped her career so far. At the same time, as a pair, the titles do seem to do a good job of summarising the past couple of years of the musician’s life, a distillation to reach the essence of existence, followed by the courage to push outward again.
Even when talking about ‘The Peaks’, the second single from Lean In, which was released in November, Mackey seems to gravitate toward opposites, describing the track as “peaks and troughs, offering moments of deep calm amidst the waves of relentless beats and stuttering synths“.
The track conjures images of fast-flowing water streaming over rocks, vines racing up a tree, harsh landscapes shaped by natural forces, brimming with the sound of electronic and organic matter being fused, highlighting the fact that Art School Girlfriend still has a thing for opposites.
