On the Rise
Ok Cowgirl

For those in the know, a whole host of acts are rotating around the city’s club scene and collaborating with each other on some of the best independent projects of the year. OK Cowgirl has long been one of those mainstays, but the band — the brainchild of frontwoman Leah Lavigne — is on the precipice of something more.

Fittingly, when I meet with Lavigne, it’s a quintessentially Brooklyn day. We’re in a central Williamsburg park, chatting on a picnic table while hordes of screaming children in costume run around for what seems to be a birthday party. Their hipster parents — artists, writers, the occasional tech bro — mill about on the lawn. This is par for the course in New York, where you learn to expect the unexpected. Lavigne and the rest of the Ok Cowgirl crew have come to expect this. More than that, they’ve let this place — the breadth of its offerings, good and bad — inform their work and breathe life into the project that Ok Cowgirl has become.

Lavigne arrived in New York in 2014 to attend NYU. Coming from Detroit originally, she had no intention of studying music, though in the back of her mind she knew she might pursue it. “I’ve always been a risk averse person, and so getting a broader degree that I felt I could apply in other ways if I needed to in order to try and make money gave me some piece of mind,” Lavigne says. “And also, I just felt like my relationship to music was so personal and already so deep, and there’s so many resources that I could go and find on my own outside of school. It just didn’t feel like a good fit.”

At the time, Lavigne was performing under her own name, experimenting with different genres — jazz, folk, alternative — and meeting peer creatives all across the city. She studied the intersection of sociology and popular culture, ultimately writing a thesis on the ways in which creative middlemen (record labels, curators, or even, yes, culture writers) hold power over and often remove it from the artist. She played the open mic circuit, and she took time to figure out what she wanted for herself as a writer, a musician, and a person.

Ultimately, though, when Lavigne graduated, she felt discontent. Her solo project was neither bringing her where she wanted to go, nor was it allowing her to communicate what she thought it would. “Other people didn’t seem interested. I was like, ‘I don’t want my friends’ pity attendance at my shows,’” she said. As she sorted out where to go creatively, she got turned on to a new wave. It was the beginning of the indie renaissance, when acts like Big Thief and Snail Mail were starting to burgeon and bring into vogue a style of indie-rock that, yes, was heavy on guitars but was also heavy on lyricism and intellect. Lavigne saw in herself something she not only wanted to be but thought she could be.

“I was like, ‘Okay, so here are these people who are writing these intimate, confessional, lyric-centric, melodically strong songs.’ Growing up listening to rock music, I just never listened to the lyrics, and when I was younger I was just like, ‘Of course I’m never gonna make rock music. I’m a lyric writer, not an electric guitar player, so that’s not the right space for me,’” she says. But this new wave of bands showed her that an alternative route was possible.

Tag teaming with Jake Sabinsky and Matt Birkenholz — the band’s guitarist and drummer, respectively, and both people who Lavigne had met in her early years in the city — the beginnings of Ok Cowgirl were devised. “I enjoy the social element of it,” Lavigne says of the transition into creating with a group. “I spend a lot of time alone in my head, blowing over these thoughts, fine tuning lyrics, and it’s really nice to also have a stage in my musical creation process where I get to be in a room with a bunch of friends and talk ideas out. It rounds out the experience of making music in a way that keeps it fun and more positive.”

The band — completed by bassist John Miller — found its beginnings in the DIY ethos of New York. To Lavigne's credit, that route often breeds the most innovation and the best art. Lavigne took care of the lyrics, while Sabinsky and Miller helped build its sonic world, a dreamy but rocking riff on the late-2010s indie sound. She learned how to play the guitar, truly, and got to know the instrument in ways that matched her ambition. She worked for five years at various New York venues — Union Pool, the Sultan room — both to support herself and also to become steeped in the industry she sought to join.

“I met a lot of bands and musicians that way,” she tells me. “I loved getting to be exposed to so much live music in that time. It really broadened my horizons. I saw so many shows I never would have bought tickets to, but when I’m work and that’s what’s on, it was inspiring and interesting to see metal bands and experimental jazz bands and bluegrass bands and country rock bands that have been touring the country for the past 30 years and just take in influences from all these different ways.”

Having conversations at those venues, watching shows, meeting patrons allowed Lavigne the space to envision the kind of project she wanted for herself. And it allowed her not to prejudge her success, to be kind to herself even while former NYU classmates (Maggie Rogers, Fletcher, Del Water Gap, and the like) were blowing up on Instagram and in the industry. Things, she realised, would come in time.

At long last, Ok Cowgirl released their first EP, Not My First Rodeo, in 2021, just as the world was coming out of its first lockdown. The group recorded it with Miller as their producer in Brownsville, deep in Brooklyn, over a handful of days with random sessions cobbled together here and there. The EP was very much just a taste of what was to come. Lavigne had her sights set on an LP, but knew getting there would take far more money and time than she could comfortably shell out right on the heels of the EP.

The years after Not My First Rodeo, then, were foundational. The band played gigs, networked, and leveled up. As Ok Cowgirl grew — in experience and legitimacy, even if not in numbers — Lavigne felt herself changing, too. She went through a Big Breakup, the gut wrenching, painfully adult kind, and found herself reckoning with the messiness of her early 20s. Her way through all of this was writing. “I don’t think I have the running away problem. I actually think I have the hyper-fixate and try to solve everything immediately problem,” she says and laughs. “But at the end of the day, life is hard for pretty much everybody, and you have to find a way to have fun, find community, and not feel alone.”

With new material taking shape, Lavigne saved and searched for outside producers who could give her songs the professional flair she believed they deserved. She found that in Alex Farrar, the owner of the iconic Drop of Sun Studio in Asheville, NC (the production home of MJ Lenderman, Angel Olsen, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, Indigo De Souza, and more). There, in a secluded Americana paradise, the band recorded Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut, a sweeping and mature debut LP. On the record — which released originally over the summer and will have a debut reprise in the winter — Lavigne steps into herself and finds impressive versatility. On “Our Love,” for example, her voice lilts overtop of an expansive and yearning arrangement, reminiscent of suckerpunch indie classics like “Boyish” by Japanese Breakfast or “Dreams Tonite” by Alvvays, while on “Larry David” she’s emboldened by a cheeky refrain, screaming “everything sucks!” lightheartedly for the better part of four minutes.

Rightfully, the project is now opening new doors for Lavigne and the band. The days of playing to pity audiences are long gone, and the promise of professional musicianship is drawing closer. The signs are all there: “We’re finally breaking out of the New York scene,” Lavigne says, excitedly. “This community has really held us and nurtured us. But up until this album, they were all of our streams … It’s been awesome to have people DMing me who live in, like, Texas or Chicago asking us to come there. And I’m like: ‘No!’ Well, unless somebody pays for my plane ticket.” And with a freshly announced tour on the horizon, it seems like that just might have happened. Ok Cowgirl are officially full steam ahead.