Your Smith

The first new music from Your Smith in over five years, The Rub is a testament to the risk and beauty in abandoning the dreams that once defined you. After devoting most of her life to cultivating a celebrated career as a singer/songwriter—including releasing a series of critically lauded projects, touring internationally, and collaborating with major pop superstars and indie darlings alike—the Minnesota-bred artist shelved a body of work she’d begun creating in 2020, with the intention of taking a potentially permanent break from music. But after nearly four years of living a dramatically different existence (including starting a family and returning to college at age 32), Smith felt called back to songwriting with a wildly altered perspective on identity, art, and the never-ending work of building a good life.

“Before the pandemic, I was a touring artist and my husband was a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant—we were both so excited about what we were doing, but at the same time it felt like there was a huge hole in our lives that couldn’t be filled,” says Smith, who left her former homebase of L.A. and moved to Minneapolis in the early days of lockdown. “There’s this idea that living your dreams means you’re completely free, when really you can end up quite stuck. Once we made the radical decision to choose a normal life, the world opened up in a way that hadn’t felt possible.”

Mostly made with Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker of Saint Paul-bred indie-rock band Hippo Campus, The Rub takes its title from the Shakespearean turn of phrase indicating a stubborn obstacle to a desired outcome. “A big part of making this record was figuring out how music could coexist with this new life I’d created,” says Smith, now the mother of a three-year-old boy and co-owner of a restaurant with her husband, Adam To. “It wasn’t a very neat or fluid process, but it required me to think about how to fit music into my life in a way that’s entirely on my own terms.”

Despite the complexity of its creation, The Rub inhabits a warm and lovely ease that feels gorgeously out of step in an era of hyper-compressed pop. Produced by Luppen (a songwriter/producer/ engineer who’s also worked with Charly Bliss and Samia), the album strays from the sleek aesthetic of her 2019 EP Wild Wild Woman and leans into her love for ’70s R&B and soft rock, unfolding in breezy grooves and lush guitar tones and brightly soulful piano melodies. For help in forging the LP’s timeless yet wholly unpredictable sound, Smith and Luppen recorded with a full band, then ornamented each song with beautifully strange details and unexpected textures. Rooted in Smith’s ever-captivating vocal work, the result is an ideal setting for her tenderly drawn and confessional vignettes of those seemingly small moments that hold so much meaning.

Recorded at Pachyderm Studios (a residential space inside an old-growth forest), The Rub first began taking shape in the brief period between Smith’s move to Minneapolis and the start of her musical sabbatical. “I came from a really great community of writers and producers in L.A., but when we got to Minneapolis I didn’t have anyone to work with,” she says. At the suggestion of her sister, Smith reached out to Luppen, who turned out to be a longtime fan of her work (an expansive catalog that includes her defunct indie-folk band Caroline Smith & the Good Night Sleeps and debut solo album Half About Being a Woman). But while Smith felt an immediate chemistry with Luppen and Stocker—and quickly enlisted them in creating her next album—she ultimately felt an overwhelming need to disengage from the demands of a modern music career. “The rigid cycle of write/release/tour/write had broken enough for me to assess if I wanted to do it at all anymore,” she says. “When I finally found the bravery to walk away, we had a lot of great songs we were leaving behind.”

Upon reconnecting in 2024, Smith and her two collaborators soon came up with a song called “Peaches,” The Rub’s bittersweet lead single. “I remember feeling like I had no idea how to write anymore, but Jake engendered a very safe creative space where I felt unbelievably loved and supported, and the song just poured out of me,” Smith recalls. A winning introduction to The Rub’s radiant sonic world, “Peaches” tells the tale of a make-believe road trip, channeling both carefree nostalgia and heavy-hearted longing for an unattainable past. “I wrote that song in a moment when my older brother was going through a very difficult time and I was dealing with a lot of change in my own life,” she says. “It’s about wishing I could just scoop us up and drive us away, but also wishing I could have done that in our childhood.”

With a singular gift for locating sweetness and joy in the most uncomfortable of feelings, Smith brings a particularly enchanting candor to “Hey There’s My Girl”—an intimate look at the delight and occasional mortification of having a crush on your closest friend. “It’s about waking up hungover with anxiety, because the night before you almost kissed your best friend and told them you loved them,” says Smith. “It was a scary song to write, but I think a lot of women understand that feeling. Women are complicated creatures, and sometimes love feels and looks like a bunch of different emotions colliding all at once.” Another twist on the typical love-song trope, “Leaving You” presents a lived-in portrait of interminable heartache, imbuing her lyrics with a charming nonchalance (e.g., “It must be nice on the other side of feeling like you’re kind of dying”). “That’s the first song I ever wrote with Jake,” Smith points out. “It’s about how sometimes it feels like you’ll spend your entire life getting over your first heartbreak—but when I hear it, I hear the spark between two people creating something together for the very first time.”

One of the most exhilarating moments on The Rub, “Mr. Revival” is a reimagined remnant of a track written in 2018, back when she’d recently adopted the Your Smith moniker and started working with heavy-hitting pop producers in L.A. With its pulsating beats and frenetic guitar work, the larger-than-life anthem telegraphs the power and triumph in self-reinvention. “It’s a song about rebirth and facing the final boss of yourself, and feels even more apropos now that I’m going through an even bigger revival in my career,” says Smith. As a counterpoint to “Mr. Revival,” the sublimely wistful yet self-assured “Little Highways” emerged from what she sums up as “the death of who I previously was as an artist.” “I wrote that when I’d just found out I was pregnant; it’s the last song I came up with before I walked away from music,” she says. “It’s tough to get out of the grind and divorce yourself from the monster of an ego you’ve created, but we found that throwing up those guardrails gave us a whole new direction to pursue, and jolted the car into fifth gear.”

Growing up in the northern Minnesota town of Detroit Lakes, Smith began her journey as an artist during her high-school years and opened for blues legend B.B. King when she was just 16-years-old. After moving to Minneapolis, she founded her former band and rose to fame in the local scene, then headed to L.A. in the mid-2010s and landed a deal with a boutique record label under the name Your Smith. “By the time I stepped away from music, I’d been on the nonstop merry-go-round of writing and releasing and touring for more than half my life,” says Smith. “There’s a pressure that comes with constantly trying to prove yourself—and even though that pressure can lead to great material sometimes, it can also create a kind of choked feeling. With this new album I finally stopped holding on so tightly to everything, and allowed myself to do whatever felt right to me.”

In reflecting on the shift in mindset that brought her to The Rub, Smith acknowledges a certain irony in her chosen alias. “I started calling myself Your Smith in order to have a character to hide behind, but now I’ve come full circle and feel the opposite way,” she says. “I love high-concept art, but I think the world needs more artists who aren’t so interested in building a persona. This album was written by a woman in middle America whose life is very family-oriented; I very much let go of the need to come off like the cool L.A. girl. Nothing about it was made for the approval or affirmation of others, and because of that I created something that’s completely from my heart.”