Silver Liz – III

Silver Liz’s latest full-length for the couple’s Extremely Pure label, III, is their most idiosyncratic to date.

Named after a painting at the Andy Warhol museum, Silver Liz — a duo consisting of Carrie and Matt Wagner — officially cemented themselves as an electric force when offered the opportunity to open a packed show for still-ascending Kero Kero Bonito in Chicago. Their albums I Can Feel The Weight and It Is Lighter Than You Think showcased their take on jangle pop, shoegaze, and dream pop that were smudged in futuristic, baroque ways.

In 2024, Wagner’s solo debut We Could Stay harkened to dance classics by The Field and Daniel Avery and earned a 7.6 from Pitchfork while yielding bookings at cutting edge clubs in Brooklyn. III is similarly futuristic, with its burbly synthesis and restless arrangements. Where prior Silver Liz efforts were jangly and familiar, these nine fuzzy tracks are steeped in fluidity and climactic motion — equally indebted to ‘90s alternative and contemporary electronics.

Now based in Brooklyn, Silver Liz’s he new album is set for a January 30th release, lead by the new single “Dream More Vivid” out today.

The track is a bittersweet blend of indie pop anchored by heavy shoegaze guitars, with a kaleidoscope of textures at the forefront—Sweet Trip-style glitches, harp samples from a Ravel composition, chopped breakbeats, and ambient pulses reminiscent of Steve Reich. It’s a triumphant (re)introduction, balancing glitchy maximalism with songwriting that cuts through—marking Silver Liz as one of indie’s more quietly inventive voices.

On the track, Carrie shares: “‘Dream More Vivid’ is one of the rare songs we’ve written that originated from a jam in our apartment. Most of the time I will just send Matt iPhone voice memo demos of songs even though we are in the same apartment. But when he added those guitar chords to the opening synth line I came up with, we just knew we had something. We also performed this one live for a long time before recording it and testing it on audiences helped us refine the song. Thematically, the song follows a character we all know: the hot mess at a high school reunion who is coping with crushed dreams and bad decisions by tearing others down to lift themselves up.”

Matt elaborates: “On this track and throughout the album in general, I wanted the production to constantly flow through disparate spaces and sounds. We really embraced a maximalist approach. It is hard to know when to stop adding ideas. Whenever Carrie says there is too much going on, I trust it is time to stop.”

Though they share an apartment, it was shaped by an individualistic process. Carrie sketched Voice Memos, which were fine-tuned together, before Matt tinkered with the ideas in Ableton. “The only rule for writing and production is that we just both have to love it,” they say. They completed vocals and guitar over two strenuous weeks in 2023, at lifelong friend Shawn Pringle’s studio in Matt’s hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The remainder of III was fleshed out in Matt and Carrie’s living room, aided by the freedom of quitting their day jobs.

III is a sincere, vulnerable relic of Matt and Carrie’s 20s. Lyrics that grapple with interpersonal disenchantment, grief, and loneliness mingle with therapeutic storytelling. “We started writing this record shortly after we relocated from Chicago to Brooklyn in May 2021,” they remember. “We had a lot of college friends from the East Coast who had been living here for a while. We spent our first year sharing a house in Bed-Stuy with two really good friends and then they moved to another city and we moved to our own place. After that, it felt like more and more of our friends were moving away from New York City while we were just getting started.” Matt and Carrie drew solace in songwriting as they navigated the transactional isolation of a competitive market.

As III finally emerges, Carrie and Matt are embarking on a fresh chapter. They recently had their first child, Amelia, and are gearing up for a return to Pittsburgh. The ongoing adaptation lends the album a sense of retrospective catharsis. “As the old idiom goes, ‘third time’s the charm’ — and on this record we really feel like we kind of achieved our eureka moment in terms of what we have always wanted one of our records to be,” the pair muse. Across III, distorted fretwork and bittersweet singing flutter like memories caught in a butterfly net.

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