Nymphlord’s Tia Rabinovitz transforms the fluorescent ache of the workday into a cathartic act of artistic self-claiming on “Garden,” a dreamy indie rock standout from her bold, beautifully off-kilter debut album ‘Shedding Velvet.’

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Stream: “Garden” – Nymphlord

Guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all-hands /  Feeling like a loner at the local show again…

* * *

The self doesn’t stop growing just because the world asks it to sit still.

The body can stay parked in a desk chair, answering emails beneath fluorescent hum, while the inner life keeps reaching for sun. Roots do their most stubborn work in the dark, and sometimes the brightest blossom is the one gathering quietly where no one has thought to look.

A radiant alternative anthem about artistic identity, private restlessness, and the beautiful act of choosing yourself, “Garden” blooms in the brutal beige of the workday: A song for anyone who’s ever sat under fluorescent lights with a whole secret self humming beneath their skin. Nymphlord turns creative survival into a captivating alternative reverie – dreamy, quirky, comforting, cathartic, and alive with off-kilter charm as she sings of guitar picks in pockets, marketing all-hands, cubicle daydreams, and the stubborn refusal to let ordinary life shrink the artist within. “I am a garden that keeps growing / and you can’t fence me in,” she declares in the chorus, her voice a beacon of feeling as the song rises on twanging guitar, spirited percussion, and little sonic sparks that make every listen feel like its own strange, enchanting adventure.

‘Blood Cults’, ‘Succubus’
‘Mall Goth’ and ‘So Famous’
‘Quaking Ass-man’
and ‘Your Mom’s Sedan’
These are the band names
that got canned

Out now via Lauren Records, “Garden” appears on Nymphlord’s recently released debut album Shedding Velvet, a ten-track coming-of-age world where self-doubt, ambition, humor, disillusionment, and identity all rub up against each other until they glow. Raised in the wooded foothills of Northern California and now based in Los Angeles, Nymphlord (aka Tia Rabinovitz) makes music that pulls from ‘90s rock, Laurel Canyon acoustic textures, punk intimacy, and Top 40 instinct – songs that feel close to the microphone and wide open at the same time. On Shedding Velvet, acoustic strums stretch into raw electric swells, hushed confessionals take sudden left turns, and beauty and ugliness sit beside each other like old friends learning how to share a room.

The album’s title gives the record its body-horror beauty: Before deer antlers reach their full size, they’re wrapped in a protective layer of velvet that eventually peels away in a surprisingly bloody process. Nymphlord channels that image into a map for becoming – itchy, exposed, funny, tender, and a little grotesque, with growth arriving not as a clean transformation, but as a raw reveal. Across Shedding Velvet, she writes from an unsettled in-between: The part of life where identity is hardening into shape, but the self still feels soft to the touch.

This tension runs through the album’s most arresting moments. “Garden” frames creative survival as a bloom under pressure; “Star” twists adolescent longing, shame, and status into an uneasy fantasy of being seen; “Emptiness” turns depletion into a charged and churning animal crawl; “Paper or Plastic?” makes modern guilt feel absurd, intimate, and impossible to outrun; and “Good Time Diner” closes the record by asking whether friendship can survive the distance between who we were and who we have become. These songs don’t sand down contradiction; they let it snag. They let the jokes sit beside the wounds. They let beauty and ugliness press up against each other until the whole thing feels alive.

“My music straddles the line between the personal and the universal,” Nymphlord tells Atwood Magazine. “There’s a lot of me in every song, but I also like leaving enough room for the listener to make up their own minds. One of the best compliments I ever got was when someone described my music as light and heavy at the same time. Another recent comment said ‘there’s an edge without bitterness. Just joy.’ and I liked that too.”

That light-heavy balance is exactly what gives “Garden” its magic. The song is playful and tender, but its roots dig deep into the pressure of trying to make art while paying bills, keeping pace, and holding onto a creative identity the world doesn’t always make room for. The chorus came to Nymphlord in a conference room, mid-meeting – a small eruption of melody and self-recognition in the middle of corporate routine. In that sense, “Garden” is less an escape from the workday than a reclamation of it: Proof that even under the dullest lights, imagination can pressurize until it breaks through.

Guitar pick in my pocket
at the marketing all-hands
Feeling like a loner at the
local show again, I could’ve
Been the girl you wanted
if I had been a consultant
But my brother is an anarchist
and I’d hate to disappoint him

I quit worshipping false idols,
I’m just looking for some real friends
Yeah I traded out the emails
for a ball point pen

I am leaving, I am learning,
I am getting back on track
I am a garden that keeps growing oh
And you can’t fence me in

“The chorus of this song came to me in a conference room, mid-meeting. You can hear that moment in the lyrics – ‘guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all hands.’ That’s the one thing I’ll say in favor of an office job – being steeped in beige for that many hours a day really has a way of pressurizing your creativity, until suddenly it just pops out. That was happening to me constantly around this time. I might have conceived as much as half of this album behind the steering wheel on my commute home.”

“To be a musician today takes so much,” she continues. “It feels like you have to wear so many hats and create so many things outside of music just to stand a chance, and that puts a lot of pressure on us both financially and personally. There’s this romanticized image of a starving artist, but even those who are willing to starve are finding that it’s just not enough.”

“When I tried to pursue music in a more full-time way and couldn’t swing it I felt ashamed. But in writing this song, I finally found the words to say – if even just to myself – ‘so what’? So what if I have to work in order to create. My Hannah Montana girls know sometimes a double life is just a part of the bargain. If that’s what I have to do then that’s what I’ll do. I can still claim my identity as an artist first.”

That last line is the heart of “Garden”: Claiming yourself before the world gives you permission.

Nymphlord calls the track “a coming-of-age anthem in corporate drag,” and that phrase unlocks the song’s whole inner life – its wink, its ache, its defiance, its wonderfully left-of-center confidence. She’s not pretending the desk, the commute, the emails, or the financial pressure don’t exist. She’s singing through them, around them, above them, until the song becomes a little act of self-definition: Knowing who you are even when you’re not actively showing who you are, believing in the version of yourself you most want to become.

Work sucks, I know but
Making art is harder
when you’re broke
At the heart of all of my
cubicle daydreams
Is a coming-of-age song
played on some nylon strings

I’m only getting older
And it’s only getting harder
Is it worth the risk of flashing
All my cards to every voyeur?

“‘Garden’ is like a coming-of-age anthem in corporate drag,” Nymphlord says. “It’s confident but a little off-kilter, with a knowing wink to the listener who might also be sitting at a desk or feeling trapped in a life they didn’t even realize they chose. After Garden, the rest of the album explores the other sides of that feeling. The songs definitely all dance around the idea of coming into yourself while also feeling a bit out of place in your own skin.”

“I think I was thinking a lot about how we as people perform authenticity – on stage, online, in the fluorescent half-light of an office all-hands – and how that might influence the way we see ourselves. As a result, the songs span from expressing anger, to admiration, nostalgia, apathy, and optimism. I hope they’ll make people stop and think, giving them a chance to understand their own lives better in the process.”

This sentiment makes Shedding Velvet feel less like a debut album announcing a fixed identity than a record actively peeling one open.

It’s messy in the way becoming is messy: full of old shame, strange jokes, ugly synths, excessive percussion, rhythmic acoustic guitars, sudden tenderness, and melodic flashes that cut through like light under a door. Nymphlord lets the album be unsteady because selfhood is unsteady. She lets it be funny because panic often is. She lets it be beautiful without pretending beauty has to arrive clean.

The record keeps changing rooms, but it never loses that charged, close-to-the-bone intimacy. The dreamy “Candy” is all appetite and projection, a sweet little flute- and acoustic guitar-led fever of envy, desire, performance, and self-reproach that swerves from humor into rot with a grin still stuck to its face; when Nymphlord lands on “I’m a bad feminist,” the line resonates less like a confession than a trapdoor opening beneath an already-complicated gaze. “Deep Cut,” by contrast, is flushed and physical, a brash, two-minute spark of radiant attraction where the body gives itself away before the mouth can catch up. “I feel the bone and knife hit,” she sings, turning a car-window crush into a sharp, cinematic jolt. Then “Summer ’03” folds the album inward with lush finesse, shrinking its world to childhood memory and the ache of protection: “I miss being your little girl.” In these songs, Nymphlord doesn’t just write about growing up; she writes about the weird afterimages that linger when old versions of ourselves refuse to disappear quietly.

Another undeniable highlight, “Star” is Shedding Velvet at its most hushed and cinematic – a soft, soul-stirring cautionary tale whose twanging guitar and subterranean synths pull teenage fantasy into shadow. Inspired by Heathers and rooted in true stories, the song moves like a warning whispered too late, tracing how girlhood, class, envy, exposure, and ambition can twist into one another until innocence starts to feel staged. “I think I’m gonna be a star, star, star, star,” Nymphlord sings, letting the line shimmer with desire and dread at once – a dream of being seen that already knows what visibility can cost.

Elsewhere, Shedding Velvet turns its gaze toward the roles we rehearse until they start to feel like personality.

“Filter” is one of the album’s most unnerving and enchanting pieces, a jagged meditation on moral performance, digital reflex, and borrowed righteousness, with “I only pretend to cry” repeating like a glitch in the conscience. It’s a song about wanting to be good and knowing how easily goodness becomes theater – a feeling that courses through the album’s satire, tenderness, and dread. By the time “Good Time Diner” ends the record, all that instability has softened into a more bittersweet question of memory and attachment. The setting is ordinary, almost sweet, but the emotional charge is devastating: “Do you still think we’d be friends” is the album’s final ache, a small sentence carrying years of love, distance, and recognition.

Taken as a whole, Shedding Velvet feels like a record of thresholds: The bedroom and the stage, the office and the venue, childhood and adulthood, wanting to disappear and wanting badly to be witnessed. Nymphlord’s songs keep arriving at those charged doorways and lingering there, letting desire curdle into embarrassment, embarrassment bloom into humor, and humor crack open into startling vulnerability. The album’s sharpest jokes are never just jokes; its prettiest passages are never merely pretty. Everything has a second face, a hidden bruise, an odd pulse beneath the skin.

Guitar pick in my pocket
at the marketing all-hands
Feeling like a loner at the
local show again, I could’ve
Been the girl you wanted
if I had been a consultant
But my brother is an anarchist
and I’d hate to disappoint him

That is why “Garden” remains such a powerful gateway into the album’s world. It gives Shedding Velvet its most immediate act of self-claiming, turning all that instability into motion, melody, and release. Where other songs circle shame, fantasy, depletion, performance, and memory, “Garden” plants its feet and grows outward – not because the surrounding pressures have disappeared, but because Nymphlord has found a way to keep making herself inside them.

The refrain carries such force because it feels both simple and enormous. “I think in simplest terms it just means that I’m going to keep moving forward no matter what,” Nymphlord reflects. “Like those trees you see sometimes that are growing around poles and chain-link fence…” That image captures the song’s resilient wonder: Growth that adapts without asking permission, softness that finds its own shape around obstruction. By the end, when she sings of trading emails for a real big band and becoming the person she would want instead, “Garden” feels less like a daydream than a breakthrough – a spirited, soul-bright reminder that inspiration can strike anywhere, and that a life divided does not have to mean a self diminished.

I quit worshipping false idols,
I’m just looking for some real friends
Yeah I traded out the emails
for a ball point pen

I am leaving, I am learning,
I am getting back on track
I am a garden that keeps growing, oh
And you can’t fence me in

As a centerpiece, “Garden” is the album’s thesis in bloom: A song about finding the nerve to keep growing in conditions that were never designed for you.

As part of Shedding Velvet, it becomes even more resonant – one chapter in a larger portrait of identity in process, where ambition and embarrassment, humor and grief, longing and self-recognition all keep changing each other’s shape.

Cathartic and charismatic, “Garden” is one of those songs that makes the mundane feel mythic. It takes the office, the venue, the commute, the bathroom stall, the forest, the stage, and the self-in-progress, and braids them into a strange little anthem of becoming. Nymphlord’s debut album may be called Shedding Velvet, but “Garden” is all bloom: Messy, musical, funny, tender, and impossible to fence in.

To step further into that overgrown world, Atwood Magazine caught up with Nymphlord’s Tia Rabinovitz to discuss creative survival and authenticity, the beauty and ugliness of Shedding Velvet, and how “Garden” became cathartic proof that inspiration can strike anywhere.

I’m a garden that keeps growing and they will
Never fence me in
I’m a garden, giving, growing, now that I’m out
I’m not coming back in

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:: stream/purchase Garden here ::

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:: stream/purchase Shedding Velvet here ::

— —

Stream: ‘Shedding Velvet’ – Nymphlord

A CONVERSATION WITH NYMPHLORD

Nymphlord (Tia Rabinovitz): My music straddles the line between the personal and the universal. There’s a lot of me in every song but I also like leaving enough room for the listener to make up their own minds. One of the best compliments I ever got was when someone described my music as light and heavy at the same time. Another recent comment said “there’s an edge without bitterness. Just joy.” and I liked that too.

Nymphlord: Growing up I was a voracious radio listener. “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes, “Tangled Up In Me” by Skye Sweetnam, and “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman are a few songs from that early listening era that I think are still seeping their way into my music. But the first band I ever really loved was probably Girlpool. I just remember hearing them and thinking, Wow.. music can be this simple and this intense at the same time?? I was also discovering Grimes around then, and was inspired to learn to produce music myself as a result. Also, I love every song ever played on the show Gilmore Girls, especially but not only the incredible nirvana cover of the David Bowie song “The Man Who Sold The World.”

Before we made ‘Shedding Velvet’ I remember trying to explain the sound we were chasing to my producer Katie. She showed me Juana Molina’s album ‘Segundo’ and I was blown away. We didn’t end up there at all… but we were very inspired by her experimentalism, restraint, and boundlessness.

My performances and playing have also been greatly informed by an improvisational ambient collective I’ve been playing in for the last few years called ‘Academy of Light.’ It’s taught me a lot about letting go, and listening. Trusting that the right cue will stick out to your ear if it’s meant for you.

Nymphlord: The chorus of this song came to me in a conference room, mid-meeting. You can hear that moment in the lyrics – “guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all hands.” That’s the one thing I’ll say in favor of an office job – being steeped in beige for that many hours a day really has a way of pressurizing your creativity, until suddenly it just pops out. That was happening to me constantly around this time. I might have conceived as much as half of this album behind the steering wheel on my commute home.

To be a musician today takes so much. It feels like you have to wear so many hats and create so many things outside of music just to stand a chance, and that puts a lot of pressure on us both financially and personally. There’s this romanticized image of a starving artist, but even those who are willing to starve are finding that it’s just not enough.

When I tried to pursue music in a more full-time way and couldn’t swing it I felt ashamed. But in writing this song, I finally found the words to say – if even just to myself – ‘so what’? So what if I have to work in order to create. My Hannah Montana girls know sometimes a double life is just a part of the bargain. If that’s what I have to do then that’s what I’ll do. I can still claim my identity as an artist first.

Nymphlord: Knowing who you are even when you’re not actively showing who you are. Believing in yourself as the version of yourself you most want to be.

Nymphlord: That is so real haha. For me personally I’ve found the more time I spend in deep focus, the more creative I feel afterwards. So if I’m scattered and doing busy work or running errands all day, then my brain will still feel scattered and busy when I’m done. But if I’m thinking really intensely about something all day, it’s almost like it wipes a clean slate and creates space for wonder and curiosity to wash back in.

I studied math in school and work in a math related field when I’m not doing music now. Coding and statistics use a completely different part of the brain than writing poetry or humming a melody. For me doing one feeds the other, one side gets to rest while the other works. Music is my night shift. She’s well rested by the time the sun goes down.

Nymphlord: I think in simplest terms it just means that I’m going to keep moving forward no matter what. Like those trees you see sometimes that are growing around poles and chain-link fence…

Nymphlord: Cathartic in a sense. Proof that inspiration can strike from anywhere—and although I’d rather be playing a sold out show at Madison Square Garden, there’s merit to the smaller, more mundane, moments in life.

Nymphlord: “Garden” is like a coming-of-age anthem in corporate drag. It’s confident but a little off-kilter, with a knowing wink to the listener who might also be sitting at a desk or feeling trapped in a life they didn’t even realize they chose. After Garden, the rest of the album explores the other sides of that feeling. The songs definitely all dance around the idea of coming into yourself while also feeling a bit out of place in your own skin.

I think I was thinking a lot about how we as people perform authenticity – on stage, online, in the fluorescent half-light of an office all-hands – and how that might influence the way we see ourselves. As a result, the songs span from expressing anger, to admiration, nostalgia, apathy, and optimism. I hope they’ll make people stop and think, giving them a chance to understand their own lives better in the process.

Nymphlord: Shedding Velvet is the culmination of many years of dreaming, trying, failing and occasionally succeeding. It is a menagerie of emotion, which feels very relatable to my journey as a woman and a musician. When listening to the album there is an equal chance of crying and laughing (or maybe both at the same time) which I hope comes through as just a day in the life… or at least, one in my life.

This album’s producer Katie Von Schleicher and I had never met in person before we met up to record this album. We recorded for 10 days straight without taking a break. It was actually a very intense experience. But luckily she is a genius with a great sense of humor and an endless well of talent, so we didn’t hit any snags. Plus, she managed to tolerate me for the full 100 recording hours – cherry on top!

While we were making the album, I was super into excessive percussion and very rhythmic, almost shaker-like acoustic guitars as well as just hideous sounding synths. I wanted them to just sound as ugly as possible. Katie was great at bringing in more beauty. We wanted to put these two things up against each other in this album – ugliness and beauty.

But lately I’ve been listening to music that’s as imbued with as much yearning as possible, both in a positive and a negative sense. Like The Sundays, Innocence Mission, Linda Perhacs, as well as a lot of 90s / 2000s kind of like earlier earlyish emo like American Football.

Nymphlord: Something that I’ve always loved as a writing tool but haven’t fully explored production-wise in my songs yet is looping. Some artists who are using repetition in ways that I really admire are Arlo Parks, Skullcrusher, Portishead, and Boards of Canada. All very different styles but equally hypnotic.

From a writing perspective, I love Blondshell! I really appreciate how her sound also mirrors the rawness of her lyrics. I just think she has a really cool confessional style that’s vulnerable but tough at the same time. And her lyrics are funny, she’s so witty. Also Grace Ives. She’s another writer who I am like, “explode my brain, why don’t you?” Her lyrics and melodies are so visceral and hilarious and filled with life.

When it comes to the overall feeling of a song (thinking back to the yearning kick I’ve been on…) June McDoom is someone who I can’t get enough of. I love how every moment on her self-titled feels like a surprise, I tried to take a lot of inspiration from that while recording ‘Shedding Velvet.’

And ok one more… lately I’ve also been listening to Babehoven a lot. They have this line: “An idea will leave me breathless,” that just breaks my heart every time I hear it. I wish I had thought to capture that feeling in those words, I’m so grateful they did.

God, so much great stuff! I just love music so much, but what’s funny is that actually I don’t even listen to music that often. It just makes me too emotional! I’m a compartmentalizer. I listen to maybe four podcasts a day. Listening to recorded music is a special occasion thing for me. I would never get anything done if I listened to a lot of music every day.

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:: stream/purchase Garden here ::

:: connect with Nymphlord here ::

:: stream/purchase Shedding Velvet here ::

— —

Stream: “Garden” – Nymphlord

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