Lady Pills - What I Want (2022)

In early 2020, writing another record was the last thing on Ella Boissonnault’s mind. At the time, the 23-year-old Lady Pills bandleader was fresh off a breakup and feeling the sting of what she now calls the “classic Boston story” among recent Berklee College of Music grads: “You make all your friends, and then everyone moves to New York or LA.” The band had already lost two drummers to other cities, and though she didn’t want to leave Boston herself, it was getting harder to fight off her own doubts about pursuing music.

Then the pandemic arrived, along with more upheaval: Bassist Alison Dooley moved away from Boston for grad school, leaving Boissonnault without her closest collaborator — or any band left to speak of. “I was living alone, and the idea of being able to go on tour or play a show just seemed so impossible at that point. I don’t want to say I gave up, but it just wasn’t a possibility in my mind,” she says.

But with the release of new album “What I Want,” out Friday on indie label Plastic Miracles, Boissonnault sets Lady Pills on a fresh course, calling the shots as a solo artist and trading the project’s reverb-heavy haze for a poppier, more immediate sound. It’s the product of a time she looks back on as “kind of an identity crisis,” spurred by the realization that she’d defined herself through her relationship, band, and job — ”and then all of those things disappeared at the same time.”