This story appears in the pages of V134: now available to order!

Olivia Osby’s first show was in the sweltering basement of a DIY venue in Atlanta, for a crowd of three people. She bundled herself in a heaping Goodwill jacket and a massive T-shirt, armor meant to conceal her most vulnerable parts. Anxiety stuck in her throat like molasses. Older guys at the venue tried to twist her into a punchline, hoping their ridicule would wash her away. But, with over a million streams for her band Lowertown—formed with her friend Avsha Weinberg—swarms of devout fans, and a record deal with Dirty Hit, all they did was add fuel to Osby’s fire.

Often, all it takes is one sneering remark to make beginners raise the white flag; but even with her tonguetied stage fright, then 16-year-old Osby had an impressively deep threshold for assholes. Her look—if Rapunzel listened to Nirvana and dyed her hair with Manic Panic, gained her a following on Instagram at just 14, so she is no stranger to hate. “Being a woman—people will criticize you for just existing,” she laughs. “So having a biggish following already built me up to understand that people are gonna be intimidated and waste their negative energy on you.”

When Osby moved during high school, the first mention she heard of Weinberg was to not hang out with him. But after they were in every-single class together, their bond could not be ignored. With Osby’s lyrics and Weinberg’s multiinstrumentals, they formed Lowertown. After releasing a self-produced album, the pair signed a record deal with Dirty Hit, and Lowertown began to blow up.

Then, in 2020, the two flew out to London to record their debut. Yet, the forecast predicted cloudy weather with a chance of global pandemic. So Osby and Weinberg, for the first time, lived on their own while stuck in a different country, in a rundown apartment with shotty Wi-Fi and a lunatic landlord. And from the depths of that isolation came The Gaping Mouth album, which oscillates from their signature lo-fi nostalgic buzz to hushed, stream-of-consciousness honesty. Osby pulls from a place of gritty self-awareness muddled with a yearning for connection.

“My music is made with the intention of expressing how I feel in the most authentic way,” Osby explains. “And a lot of my lyrics are written very spur-of-the-moment when I have an intense thought circling my head and I need to find a way to contextualize it. I hope the people who listen to my music can identify with the emotion or with the thought and just feel like less alone in the world.”