Lauren Lakis

A child of Baltimore, Lauren grew to embrace the fatalistic spirit of the city in her work and art, with stunningly raw, haunting tones and “delightfully gut-churning shoegaze”’. On her next album Deadlights, set for release on Riding Easy Records on May 8, 2026, she conjures a shifting reality—one defined by both distortion and clarity. Indebted to shoe gaze and ’90s alt rock, it's filled with ethereal vocals, melodic guitars, and a heavy low end. Lakis was born in Baltimore; where she quickly became an artist driven by the need to capture the human experience. Lakis makes songs that are steeped in darkness, but inside of them is a sense of hope. They are propelled by the possibility of emerging on the other side feeling less alone and fully transformed. Deadlights was recorded over the last year of her mother's life, and despite the recurring theme of loss in its songs, Lakis doesn’t consider Deadlights a grief album. Instead it captures what’s possible when you survive the worst reality you can imagine. “That loss, the experience of going through the absolute worst thing, there's a freedom in that,” she says. “There's a liberation in that where I almost feel invincible.”