Lia Braswell is center stage at Slipper Clutch, a barrage of multi-colored, psychedelic lights washing over her white outfit. Flanked by a guitarist and a bassist, the L.A.-based drummer and singer plays with all the energy of the lunar eclipse that passed shortly before her set began. By the time she bursts into new single, “If Not for the Chaos,” Braswell is both banging out the rhythm and belting the lyrics with full force. It’s intense.
Braswell plays live often, but, typically, not for her own project. Just days earlier, she returned to L.A. from a whirlwind trip to England, where she drummed for two Chelsea Wolfe shows. Later this month, she’ll head out on Wolfe’s U.S. tour before joining up with She Wants Revenge to drum on their European jaunt.
“I haven’t been playing a lot of solo shows recently,” Braswell said when we connected for a video call earlier that week. “Just getting my bearings around these songs that I’ve written live has been really fun, but also intimidating because I’m in charge of all of it, as opposed to working for somebody else.”
Earlier this year, Braswell released her debut solo album, Rising, on Waxwork Records. More recently, she dropped the non-album single “If Not for the Chaos.” The album has been a long-time coming for the musician, who has spent much of her career playing with bands and artists whose names you’ll likely recognize.
Braswell got her start in the heyday of L.A.’s DIY scene centered around The Smell, as well as now-defunct venues like Pehrspace and Echo Curio. “Many nights just hanging out, smoking cigarettes in that alleyway and getting all sweaty and jumping around with friends. That was how it started, really,” she recalls of The Smell. “And I’m really grateful for that because it showed me what and why I do this. It opened me to the possibilities, but kind of fast tracked me into playing bigger shows with bigger artists.”
She went from local groups Ostrich Eyes and Peter Pants to playing with Le Butcherettes, then moved to New York and joined up with A Place to Bury Strangers. Braswell has also played with TR/ST and Sextile.
When Braswell was in A Place to Bury Strangers, back in 2019, she began work on what would become Rising. “What I had been doing while I was in that band was that I was always writing and recording alone in my tiny little room in New York,” she says. “I had this tiny little apartment that had no ventilation at all, but I loved staying in there and playing an autoharp, playing my guitar, working on how to learn Logic and make beats and whatnot because I didn’t have a drum kit there at the time.”
Inspired by A Place to Bury Stranger’s drive for learning and creating, Braswell sought to do the same on her own time. She continued work on the material during the pandemic and after her move back to Los Angeles, where she “miraculously” crossed paths with future collaborators, like Omar Yakar, Jr. (Courtney Barnett, The War on Drugs), who helped build on the demos and then connected Braswell with Derek Coburn (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chelsea Wolfe), now a close collaborator who also played guitar for the Slipper Clutch show.
Through years of playing with varied artists, Braswell was able to develop her own sound. “When I first started with DIY, it turned into how do I become this strong femme singer,” she says. Through TR/ST and A Place to Bury Strangers, she became more interested in production. Braswell sought to find a balance between powerful vocals and atmospheric qualities. Then there was the challenge of singing while drumming. “If I was to sing and play drums with this, how can do that so that it doesn’t sound sloppy or annoying or my vocal is not cracking all the time?” Braswell asked herself.
She revisited classics from artists like Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins and Broadcast, while developing a sound “that wasn’t goth, that wasn’t electronic, that wasn’t feminist raging punk, but a blend of everything that I was feeling and connecting with in those projects and then making it my own.”
One song that did become an inspiration for Rising was “Good Day Today” by David Lynch. “It had this pulsing, fun, beautiful simplicity to it that I wanted to bring to my own records too,” she says.
Another influence is the work of the author Clarice Lispector. “Ever since reading all of her novels, I started to get this feel for how to express very deep emotions in a way that doesn’t feel so obvious, more poetic and how can I create the emotion into a song rather than go into surface level themes and approaches,” says Braswell.
“There’s a balance between having there be this personal, subjective experience and making it objective, that’s the challenge of pop music,” Braswell adds. “What I want to do is make it more into a story than just this broad level love song or heartbreak or grief song. So it’s taking all of these elements of life, like grief, love, longing the isolation of tour, these things that were happening in my life or that I was experiencing and trying to make individual songs that depicted those narratives.”
Her latest single, “If Not for the Chaos,” points to a new body of work that’s currently in progress. “I’ve had this album two folder of demos for a really long time and I’m just so happy that we’re finally jumping into them,” says Braswell, who was planning to work some more on the new batch of songs before the fall tours begin. Braswell says that she’s continuing in the “realm of synthwave meets that rock heaviness” that she enjoys, but with a more pronounced theme. “Rising is trinkets of my life, trinkets of experiences, trinkets of emotions,” she says. “This new record is going to be more channeling an experience that I had that is encompassed into one long form album.”
“If Not for the Chaos” and Rising by Lia Braswell are out now.
Hear “If Not for the Chaos” on the September, 2026 edition of Beatique, which also features music from Olivia Rodrigo, ear, Purity Ring, Brigette Calls Me Baby, Slayyyter and more.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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