Molly Lewis

There’s no one else quite like Molly Lewis in music today, and that’s not only because she plays a wind instrument that few others do — her lips. It’s also because her work draws on more eclectic traditions than many of her contemporaries. Lewis’ music is otherworldly, drawn more from seascapes of fantasy and dream than from any charted harbor. Like mirages, her pieces scintillate and disperse; like siren songs, they draw us in over uncharted waters; as from a good dream, we awake from her melodies wishing we could return to wherever it was that they had transported us. Even a quick encounter with Lewis’ output makes it clear: she’s been busy building her own tradition, combining surprising details of musical history with her own ideas on what music can do and be — and the result is her unmistakable, cinematic sound. She released her first EP, The Forgotten Edge, in 2021, and followed up with a second EP, Mirage, in 2022.