Eliza Edens's 'Death Drive' Is a Buoyant Masterpiece of Heavy Feelings
The Sonic Breakdown
Death Drive is Eliza Edens’s third release and by some distance her biggest-sounding: a move from 2022’s We’ll Become The Flowers and the deliberately lo-fi 2025 Bandcamp set it’s your birthday & you’re gorgeous into full production. Edens produced it with Dexter Wolfe and Pat Keen — Wolfe also engineered and mixed every track — across Spillway Sounds in West Hurley, New York, Wolfe’s own Minneapolis room, and Mason Jar Studios and assorted home setups in Brooklyn. Huntley Miller mastered it. Katie Martucci, Devon Yesberger and Nelson Devereaux each take additional production on a song, which is usually a recipe for a patchwork and here somehow isn’t.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The rhythm beds are warm and close rather than cavernous, which is the whole trick — “Booty Call” and “Hot & Mean” bounce where a more reverent mix would have moped.
The Spatial Dynamics: Wolfe keeps Edens’s voice dead centre and dry, with the jazzier and more mechanical textures arranged around it. The eleven tracks run roughly thirty-four minutes and no single one of them hits four minutes until the end.
Standout Performance
The fifteen voices on “Old Home Video,” the four-and-a-half-minute closer, among them Edens’s brother and her father. It is the one moment the record lets itself get genuinely large, and it earns it.
Why It’s Certified
⚡ New Noise gave it four out of five and called the record “courageous, fun, and musically varied,” landing on “the juxtaposition of big feelings and playfully light music is a refreshing sip of something new.”
🌈 The same review: “If music is a mirror, Eliza Edens offers a reflection that invites all of us to uncover the power in boldly being oneself.”
🌈 “Hey Mama,” written for Edens’s late mother, is the proof the album’s lightness is a choice and not an evasion.