Culture Cabinet

When Avery Lynch sits at the piano, she has one goal in mind. She’s tracing a feeling: something half-heard, half-remembered, waiting to be translated into melody. It’s a habit that began when she was a child in Pennsylvania, long before millions of streams or co-production credits. “I got started, really in 2020, but I’ve been making music for a very long time,” she says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “I went to college for it. I didn’t end up staying there for music, but I actually ended up getting my degree in business. But while I was doing that, COVID happened, and everybody moved home, and TikTok was like the only thing happening. So I started posting my songs on there, and it just kind of went from there.”

Those early uploads carried the soft ache and confessional honesty that have since become her signature. There was no plan or strategy beyond sharing something real. “I didn’t really have anything planned,” she recalls. “I just started posting, and then I released my first song, and it did really well. And I was like, ‘Okay, I should release more.’ And that’s exactly what I did.”

Five years later, Lynch’s world looks very different, yet her process remains intimate. Her new EP, Glad We Met, out now, captures the ache of growing up and the relief of finally being seen. It’s a nine-track reflection on heartbreak, healing, and rediscovering tenderness, told through warm piano tones and her unmistakable voice. “It all just kind of fell into place,” she says of the EP’s creation. “Some of the songs were written a long time ago, some of them were more recent. Really, it’s a story from my life, and each song really just follows the next in the story. I didn’t write them in order, but they all kind of fell into place.”

That mosaic-like creation mirrors her own way of processing emotion. Lynch often strays away from compartmentalizing her emotions. Rather, she writes through it. “Honestly, it’s just kind of what I do when I have something that I’m going through or experiencing or reminiscing on,” she says. “I always turn it into a song. It’s like my journal.”

Still, she admits to finding small ways to protect herself. “I try to make songs a little bit less personal by incorporating other situations or events from different relationships or friendships,” she says. “It helps make the songs feel a little bit less like I’m putting my whole heart on the line there.”

On Glad We Met, that balance between vulnerability and self-preservation is evident. Many of the songs were co-written with two people closest to her, such as her boyfriend and her longtime friend. “I write with them for everything,” she says. “It is a very different experience when you know each other so well. It’s very comfortable, and it’s cool because the subject of the songs they know about so well already, because they were there or they’ve heard all about it. It just feels easy.”

That comfort allows her to reach a deeper kind of honesty. “It definitely feels way more personal,” she admits. “Sometimes we’re like, ‘Well, we can’t say that, right? We can’t say exactly that. We got to change it a little bit.’ And it’s just nice that we all know the whole story.”

Her songs often sound like whispered conversations between heartbreak and hope, balanced in equal parts bittersweet but luminous. “I just love sad things,” she laughs. “It feels funny when I’m performing, because I’m going to be singing a really sad song and then making jokes in between. The juxtaposition is honestly kind of crazy, but I love sad songs. They make me very happy.”

That fascination with melancholy stems from her love of storytelling itself. “I’m obsessed with movies and TV shows and books and love stories and the tragic ones too,” she says. “I’m just so interested in relationships and why they don’t work out and why they do. Even the really horribly sad ones- they’re kind of brutal, but it’s beautiful.”

Her single “Sweetheart” channels the complexity of the sting of toxic love and the gentle relief of healing. “It was a topic and a situation I’ve kind of kept in my back pocket for the last six years,” she says. “From going from that relationship to this one, even when it wasn’t a relationship yet and it was just a friendship, it was just so jarring how differently I was treated.” What began as a reflection on the bare minimum evolved into one of her favorite songs. “When I was putting this project together, I needed a way to bridge everything,” she explains. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have a thing for this. I know this is going to be perfect.’ It turned out exactly how I imagined, better than I imagined.”

Now, with Glad We Met out in the world, Lynch is watching her songs find lives of their own. “It’s been really special to see how the music connects to people and how it’s like free therapy for them,” she says. “A lot of people have said that my music has gotten them through a bad breakup. I started releasing music because I was going through one, and I wanted to make myself feel better. I couldn’t find songs that felt like what I needed them to, so I started writing my own. Now the fact that they’re helping other people in those situations is really cool.”

When asked what she hopes listeners take away from the project, her answer is simple and cinematic. “I hope when they listen, they can kind of see a movie in their brains,” she says. “I love when I listen to something and I have a whole movie playing in my mind. That’s what I want for them.”

Glad We Met is out now via Records/Sony Music.