Concert Reviews

The indie-folk singer, a former Berklee College of Music student known for her viral hit “ceilings,” thrilled the crowd with an unreleased song debut that she wrote about an hour before the show Friday.

Lizzy McAlpine laid it all out in a vulnerable, emotional performance Friday night in Boston – the city where she experienced a heartbreak that inspired nearly all of the songs on her latest album.

The show was the first of two sold-out shows at MGM Music Hall at Fenway on “The Older Tour.”

Despite a full venue, the set felt intimate with McAlpine’s haunting vocals and her and her band’s powerful instrumentals striking deep.

The indie-folk artist, known for her 2022 hit “ceilings” which went viral on TikTok, didn’t bring any unnecessary bells and whistles — or even an opener — to the show.

Instead, she and her six band members — playing a range of instruments including piano and keyboard, bass, drums, and pedal steel guitar, as well as acoustic and electric — sat in a semi-circle on a set that resembled a cozy living room.

The seven of them entered the stage through a wooden door shortly after 8:45 p.m. and sat in chairs surrounded by ambient lighting and side tables — one of which had a flickering candle and a framed portrait of Steve Martin (the famous “Best Fishes” insert from the comedian’s 1978 “A Wild and Crazy Guy” album).

Wearing her hair loose and dressed in a simple white tank, blue jeans, and black Converse, McAlpine let her impressive vocal range and heart-wrenching lyrics take center stage. She also played guitar and piano, moving between a few different chairs around the stage depending on the song.

Over the course of roughly 100 minutes, McAlpine took the crowd through her latest album, “Older,” mostly in order with a few of her other hits and some surprises thrown in.

A majority of the lyrics on her third studio album were inspired by “things that occurred in this city” while attending Berklee College of Music a few years ago, the 24-year-old said.

“Drunk, Running,” for example was written “about an incident that happened with my ex,” she said. “I was not there or present for the incident, but it did happen on a Boston street.”

A songwriter to her core, McAlpine explained that some songs reflect feelings she has had, but may not necessarily have anymore.

Ahead of performing “All Falls Down,” she explained how much she struggled on her last tour, admitting the setup was not comfortable for her and inspired her to write lyrics like “23 and a sold out show/I am happy, but I’ll probably cry after you go home.”

“This time around, we are doing things differently and the music is just really fulfilling,” McAlpine told the crowd. “It feels really good and really authentic, so I don’t feel the way that this song makes it seem like I feel. I think that is what is so special about music. It’s just a moment in time, and we can look back on it from a new perspective.”

As for the album’s title track “Older,” McAlpine revealed the song was not originally on the track list and was added just three months before the album’s release, replacing a song that hadn’t satisfied her.

After coming across a voice memo with the first-person first chorus of “Older” on her phone, McAlpine brought it to the band and they wrote the rest in roughly 20 minutes, she said.

“We did three takes of it and the third take is what we used. We didn’t add or change anything to it,” the singer noted.

“It just really helped reshape the record in my eyes and it was the first original thing that we had created together,” McAlpine said of the process with the band. “We were mostly just producing this album, or reproducing it. This was the first thing that we made together. It felt really good and it unlocked everything for me.”

In addition to playing all of the songs on her latest album, McAlpine played a few songs from her 2022 album “five seconds flat,” including “doomsday” and “chemtrails.”

She also did a cover of “Lately” by Stevie Wonder, sharing, “I discovered this song while I was at Berklee actually because my ex showed it to me — it’s all about him tonight, isn’t it? I just have a lot of memories here, obviously.”

Perhaps the most exciting moment, though, was when she surprised the crowd with “Spring into Summer,” a new, unreleased song McAlpine wrote “like an hour before the show.”

The crowd squealed in delight as she explained how she had a verse written a long time ago, but felt inspiration while looking through her voice memos on the train to Boston. McAlpine brought the idea to the band backstage before the show and together, they wrote the rest with a quick turnover.