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Jan 20, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Christopher Noxon

Late next month, indie singer/songwriter Eliza Noxon is set to share her debut album, Good Monsters with Bad Habits. Noxon has been writing music since before her teenage years, releasing her first single, “Hummingbird,” and her 2017 EP, Save Your Breath, while still in grade school. In the years since, amidst all of the changes that accompany young adulthood, Noxon has been writing her debut record, teaming with producer Rilo Kiley bassist Pierre de Reeder while evoking the plaintive lyrics and sprawling arrangements of touchstones like Big Thief, Feist, or Pinegrove.

In addition to acting as a creative outlet, the album also offered a much needed form of catharsis. The album initially was shaped by the familiar travails of leaving home and stepping into young adulthood, but after the death of her brother in 2019, songwriting began to take on a new significance for Noxon. “Writing these songs saved my life,” she says. “They allowed me to express the depths of my grief without fear of judgment or worry.”

Late last year, Noxon shared the album’s lead single, “You,” and today she’s back with another new track, “What Else,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“What Else” is both an emotional bloodletting and an expansive folk rock sprawl. The instrumentation moves fluidly between intimate and dramatic modes throughout, with Noxon beginning in a solitary acoustic moment before ambling forward accompanied by swirling layers of drums, guitars, and keys. Later, the final leg of the track shifts once again into a tumbling noir-tinged waltz, ending on a note that feels uncertain and unsettled, yet beautiful in its dissonance. Lyrically, the track finds Noxon haunted by the specter of grief, constantly reminded of her loss as she moves through the city. She confesses, “And when I dream, it’s you I see / And I can’t stop / You’re the subways and the trees / But I need some room / Some air to breathe / I’ll never be you / But I don’t know what else I can be.”

Noxon says of the track, “Two songs on the record originated on the ukulele, my first instrument. As with my last single, ‘You,’ and many other songs on this record, I processed the death of my older brother through my music. It was the beginning of the pandemic; I had taken a leave from school and was living alone in New York, in an apartment filled with my brother’s things—reminders of him everywhere. The whole city reminded me of him: I’d walk past restaurants where we’d huddled over steaming dumplings, movie theaters where we’d sneak into double features, parks where we’d shared cups of coffee and talked. The song captured a moment in my life when I was struggling with where I fit in a world where I still felt like he took up so much space. One of my favorite things about this song is the final section, which I wrote and added over a year after I’d written the rest. For a long time, I felt like the song was missing its thesis statement—its big, gut-punch emotional clarity moment—and those final lines gave me the chance to tie everything up in a nice, dissonant bow.”

Check out the song below. Good Monsters with Bad Habits is out everywhere on February 27th.