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Bio by Nandi Rose

On Eliza Edens’ new album Death Drive, the New York-based artist finds themselves at the white-hot intersection of pain and pleasure. In the midst of losing their mother to dementia, they had also begun exploring their queerness for the first time in their late twenties. Grief and desire coalesced into a fireball that sent them into a state of unmooring.  “It was an intense time,” Edens says. “As I was watching my mom fade, I was also embracing a more reckless and bold side of myself in terms of identity.” The album gets its name from Freud’s theory of the “death drive,” which proposes that there is an innate human instinct towards recklessness and self-destruction in order to release tension–we smoke, we drive fast cars, we blow off steam at the bar. For Edens, this state of parallel pain and pleasure fused together with their creative impulses to create the confident, heartfelt Death Drive–their biggest and boldest album yet.

Edens has written about the experience of losing their mother before, on the lush acoustic-fingerpicked We’ll Become The Flowers (2022) and the quiet collection of lo-fi voice memos released on Bandcamp in 2025, it’s your birthday & you’re gorgeous. But if there are seven stages to grief, Death Drive feels like the transcendent eighth stage–the moment when you rediscover playfulness and humor and start reaching outward again. “I was sick of writing sad songs,” Edens admits. Instead, in this collection, sentiments of loss feel buoyant and neon-tinged, discussed with a laugh late at night over beers with friends, and undercut with the electricity of sex and desire. At their grandest moments, these songs simmer with swagger and a devil-may-care attitude–like when Edens is imagining giving head to a married woman (“All In Sinnin’) or taking advantage of free samples at Costco (“Hot and Mean”). At their quietest, they float towards a tender wistfulness–as on the candlelit “Bigger,” in which Edens tells their mother about the sweetness of lilacs and new love. 

More than half of the songs on Death Drive were written during various song-a-day exercises that Edens undertook with friends between 2023 and 2025. With this faster, off-the-cuff songwriting process, they cultivated a more instinctual relationship to the music, feeling it more in the body than the brain. “There’s something about losing someone that makes you feel this sense of urgency about life,” Edens explains, particularly when it comes to the uncertainty and unpredictability of dementia. To that end, they were drawn more to the immediacy of pop music–leading to tighter song structures, simpler chord progressions, and more direct and vulnerable lyrics. Teaming up with longtime collaborators Dexter Wolfe and Pat Keen, they set out to live-track the whole album at Spillway Sounds in West Hurley, New York, in the summer of 2024, but ended up fleshing out the material over the next year at Wolfe’s home studio in Minneapolis to create a heftier sound. (The country-tinged one-take “Keep You” and the fragile finger-picked “Caroline,” recorded on an iPhone, carry the vestiges of that original live-tracked idea.) The resulting palette is a mix of punchy electric guitars and drums, thick backing vocals, and gentle keys, with flourishes of saxophone and electronic percussion. Most surprisingly, there are bongos on every track. “It started as a joke at first and then we decided we had to do it. It makes me laugh,” Edens says, pointing to the importance of play and levity on an album underpinned by grief.

It also felt important to Edens to invite friends to sing on the album. Edens’ mother, Betsy, passed away in September 2024, in the midst of recording, and including other voices felt like a way to process the grief with community. In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which Edens was reading during the making of Death Drive, Francis Weller recalls how in the past, communities would come together to collectively wail when somebody experienced loss; the loss of one was the loss of all. Modern society doesn’t offer those supportive structures, but as Edens has found here, art can offer the sacred space we crave to come together in both grief and celebration. On “Nothing Ever Gets In The Way,” Edens duets with friend and singer Alisa Amador, the two voices threading together and lifting each other up like the braided lines of a kite. Then there are the choruses of the tongue-in-cheek “All in Sinnin’,” which move from the starkness of Edens’ voice alone to an explosion of group vocals. On final track “Old Home Video,” fifteen different singers–including Edens’ brother and father–come together to bring the album’s journey to a close.

Edens lives in New York City, and you can hear the pace of the place on a number of these tracks: the snarl of nightlife, the booty calls and bars. But pulling on Edens like a siren is their childhood in the woods of Western Massachusetts. “I miss Massachusetts and I miss Betsy,” they sing on “Hey Mama.” As Death Drive unfolds, there is a palpable urge to slow down, to freeze time. This tension of lifestyle–between living fast and moving slow–is explored most directly on the track “Hot and Mean,” a commentary on the limits of easy, convenient pleasures. Edens cites the concept of the “pleasure paradox” as inspiration for the song–the idea that the more we engage in quick hits of stimulation, the more we deplete the dopamine in our brains, thus causing ourselves more pain. “I wanna be a sloth / and move at the speed of geologic time,” Edens sings before the audio slows and drops into a tape loop, alternate-universe soundscape. Later, on “Bigger”–a transportive collage of piano loops and glitches built to “sound like a garden”–we hear an audio clip of Betsy saying “I love you, mwah!” as if beckoning her child back to the garden she herself once tended.

The album is full of these moments, which feel like antique cameo necklaces–snapshots of tenderness, worn close to the heart. There’s Caroline with her dark secret-filled eyes (“Caroline”), and Desi carrying her father’s ashes outside to see the sunrise (“Hey Mama”). There’s Edens riding shotgun with their lover’s “dirt fingernails combin’ my hair back” (“Hand In My Hand”) and Betsy onscreen, long before the illness hit her, “smilin’ by the roadside corn stand” in a pool of Wisconsin light. And this is what lingers long after the last note: these characters, these moments of connection, which make life’s swinging scythe so much more bearable.

Death Drive is a masterful achievement of contemporary indie rock, poignantly moving through the landscape of grief while also foisting joy, love, and humor up to the light. By equal turns tender and bold–a nod to what might be called “life’s wicked beauty” (“Keep You”)–it’s the sound of someone finding themselves while also losing control. Edens reminds us here that inherent in the concept of the “death drive” is the idea of a life drive–that while engaging in reckless behavior brings you closer to death, it is, in fact, a way to feel more engaged and alive. “The more intense sadness you feel, the more intense joy you feel,” Edens says. “Life just becomes richer.”

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