Life’s been a roller coaster for Liz Cooper of late. In February, the guitar-and-cigarette-wielding singer-songwriter dropped her heaviest album yet, New Day. Her third full-length release via Sleepyhead Records is aptly named. Recorded without her longtime backing band, the Stampede, the album marks Cooper’s full evolution from front woman to solo act. While it’s a decisive shift away from the psychedelic Americana sounds she came up on, New Day represents classic Cooper: nonchalant, assertive and fun as hell.
Formerly based in Nashville, Tenn., Cooper, 33, closed the book on a five-year-stint in New York City last year and now officially calls Vermont home. Not that she’s had time enough to land, she told Seven Days from a coffee shop in Berkeley, Calif., smack in the middle of the West Coast leg of a tour in support of the new record. She kicks off an East Coast run on Wednesday, April 22, at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington.
“I’ve been in Vermont consistently, but mentally, I have not been in Vermont,” Cooper said. “I’ve been in record zone.”
New Day is her most personal body of work yet. Built on sampled field recordings, layered effects and introspective lyrics, the album charts her personal journey navigating pandemic-induced isolation, her newfound queer identity and the unraveling of a toxic relationship. When she first played the songs live, “I cried onstage,” Cooper said. “This is the first time I’ve been able to process it, [to] tell my story and connect with people.”
Heaviness, however, doesn’t characterize everything about the album. While songs such as “IDFK,” “Changes” and “Baby Steps” serve as real-time markers along Cooper’s path, they’re also head boppers in their own right — buoyant and airy pop songs anchored by Cooper’s raspy croon. Much like her arrival in the Green Mountains, the album signals new beginnings.
While Cooper landed in southern Vermont last fall, the seeds of her move have long been germinating. For the past decade, Cooper has nurtured a strong taproot into the local music scene, with tendrils spreading throughout the Queen City and across the Onion River. She recorded her 2021 sophomore album, Hot Sass, at Little Jamaica, the Burlington recording studio and label run by her close friend and collaborator Benny Yurco (Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Michael Nau). And her ties run deep with Burlington’s current cohort of ascendent indie rockers, including Lily Seabird, Greg Freeman and Robber Robber, whose Nina Cates joined Cooper’s current tour on bass for the first chunk of dates.
As Cooper’s life in New York City grew increasingly inhospitable, she found respite in her visits to Burlington.
“I needed to get out of the situation I was in, and it felt like [New York City] was spitting us out,” Cooper said. “We needed to escape, and it was comical at a certain point how horrible it got.”
So Cooper fled the city life for a quintessentially Vermont experience on a cooperative homestead run by friends of Cooper’s current partner — and closer to her own friends in the Burlington scene.
“There’s something about Burlington where people actually show up for each other in a real way,” Creston Lea, owner of the Burlington guitar company Creston Electric , told Seven Days. “It feels like a place where you can build something sustainable without burning yourself out.”
Lea has built Cooper two guitars — one made of salvaged barnwood with a forest-green pickguard and a sound both slick and gruff; and another with a “meaner” magenta paint job flecked with metal flakes that shimmer under stage lights.
In between builds, the two forged a friendship. Lea said he found an old soul in Cooper.
“She’s cool in the real sense of the word,” Lea said, “ambitious without being cutthroat.”
The luthier first saw Cooper play a solo set at the Monkey House in Winooski in 2015, where her family filled out the crowd. He recalled Cooper’s blues-inflected fingerstyle playing with an air of giddy reverence. That excitement bubbled over when discussing her work with the Stampede, with whom she performed for about seven years.
“They’d be all over the place, and the music would get built into this frenzy,” he said, “and she was always super calm, eye of the storm, just tearing the guitar to pieces, looking as serene as could be.”
In 2016, a live in-studio performance for Audiotree amassed hundreds of thousands of YouTube views, capturing the band’s infectious energy, Cooper’s supercool sensibility and her gorgeous Creston guitar.
The buzz surrounding the Audiotree session followed Cooper into 2018, when she returned to Winooski for another jaw-dropping performance — this time with the Stampede in tow. A freak rainstorm forced the band from the Waking Windows music festival’s outdoor main stage to a makeshift one at Waterworks Food + Drink. Cooper and Co.’s blistering set at the restaurant lives on as a fabled Waking Windows performance.
Controlled chaos and slippery hooks still define Cooper’s live performances, but her sound has shifted from the Americana trappings of guitar-driven folk to melodious, easygoing pop songs sung in a country-tinged, crackly lilt. The gregarious Cooper exudes undeniable sangfroid, affability and unabashed honesty, onstage and off.
“There’s a vulnerability in the way she plays that you can’t really manufacture,” Lea said. “Getting to know her as a person just deepened what I was already hearing in the music.”
Recorded in Los Angeles and coproduced by Dan Molad (Lucius), New Day finds Cooper composing songs on piano, experimenting with drum machines and innovating her approach to guitar by improvising parts on the spot. The result is a catchy collection of genre-defying songs concerned with recovery. Equal parts boisterous and tender, New Day is not only more introspective than Cooper’s earlier work, it’s also an intentional sonic departure from the Nashville milieu.
“This was the first time it was just me,” Cooper said, “just kind of processing and writing the songs, tinkering for years, going back and forth into the studio and then back into my situation, writing things on the spot [and] making it in real time as my relationship was changing and crumbling … It was just very wacky.”
I am going to be genre bendy for the rest of my life.
Liz Cooper
Cooper’s confidence steadily returned as each song emerged, but it wasn’t until she wrote “Loss of Signal” that she realized she had a cohesive body of work. Wistful musically and lyrically, the song represents the album’s pop-influenced pastiche at its most Beatles-esque, featuring perfectly restrained drum fills à la Ringo, hushed vocal ostinatos of the doo-wop variety and a generally optimistic outlook on love.
Despite the recent changes in her life, Cooper hasn’t outgrown her playful antics. Her live show still promises guitar licks aplenty — and the occasional cigarette. But she’s also evolving. While novel pop hooks and experimental sonic textures characterize her latest effort, Cooper’s all-in presence and no-holds-barred attitude remain the through line connecting her discography. And it will likely remain so wherever she calls home.
“I am going to be genre bendy for the rest of my life,” Cooper said. “I’m going to make different shit for every record.”
Cooper’s exploratory outlook should be right at home in Vermont’s sonically adventuresome indie scene. At least once she’s off the road long enough to catch her breath. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Rise and Shine: With New Day, renegade indie-rock singer-songwriter Liz Cooper starts a new chapter in Vermont”
This article appears in April 15 • 2026.
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