It appears to be a trophy at first. Look closer, and you’ll see the cover of Good Story features Eliza McLamb holding a makeshift award, hot-glued together from scraps she and her mother salvaged. It is, of course, silver — a self-deprecating wink introducing the timbre of McLamb’s sophomore album. These last few years, McLamb’s been parsing her upbringing, the songs she wrote about it, and the whole endeavor of the stories we tell about ourselves. “If you get really good at telling the story of who you are, you become the story you told instead of the ever-dynamic, ever-changing person you have to be,” McLamb says. “I did really well telling the story of who I am, but I began asking: What’s the point of it?”

At only 23, McLamb has already lived multiple lives. In her late teens, McLamb found success via co-hosting the podcast Binchtopia and sharing songs on TikTok. She soon pulled back from the platform, feeling it didn’t represent her actual ethos as a songwriter. Instead, she signed to Royal Mountain and released her 2024 debut Going Through It, a document of a complex, traumatic childhood that led to searching phases — dropping out of college during the pandemic in favor of working on Midwest farms, eventually leaving her North Carolina hometown behind for Los Angeles. It all gave her plenty of stories to tell on Going Through It. And now on Good Story, she wonders how that process affected her. Yet the homemade trophy of Good Story’s cover is far from a jocular consolation prize alone. It’s a symbol of the layered, accomplished writing McLamb arrived at as she interrogated everything she thought she was about as an artist.

After touring Going Through It in the spring of 2024, McLamb began writing new material and found herself encountering an age-old trope. “I felt like I had spent my whole life writing the first record,” she says. She could’ve mined her experience for a whole catalog of music, but she wanted to step back and reassess her impulses as a writer. Good Story directly reflects upon the process of making not only Going Through It, but the process of making art derived from our personal lives altogether. “I carved out room and brought in new songs that felt fresher, able to pick up on ideas outside of this compulsion to build a personal narrative,” McLamb explains. Then, she laughs: “But then I wrote all these songs about the compulsion to make a personal narrative.”

Though Los Angeles had served her well for a time, McLamb had begun to feel suffocated by her life there. “I was on a personal mission to stop being so solipsistic,” she cracks. It led to another cross-country move to New York City. She found herself reinvigorated by being in a dense city colliding with so many different people. She fell into new scenes — music circles, but also literary crowds. Inspired by her new surroundings, McLamb’s writing process changed too. Songs arrived to her while on the subway, or on walks near her apartment.

Once she had enough material, McLamb reconvened in upstate New York with guitarist Jacob Blizard and illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, who had produced Going Through It. A greater sense of confidence allowed McLamb to open herself up to co-writing. Before Going Through It, McLamb had never played with a band. Now seasoned by the road, she began thinking about how songs would work live as she wrote. In the spring of 2025, she met up with an all-star crew of musicians at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, including Tudzin and Blizard, bassist Ryan Ficano, keyboardist Sarah Goldstone, and Death Cab For Cutie drummer Jason McGerr.

The phrase “good story” can be loaded and malleable. A “good story,” as McLamb asserts, is often about a horrible tragedy. A “good story” is something that can be weaponized by governments or media. Eventually, it became the meta title perfect for this body of work, in which McLamb continued to pull from chapters of her life while dissecting her drive to write. Accordingly, there is a degree of observational distance this time around, with few songs dropped directly into the moment they’re depicting. “This whole record, it was like I was transient, flicking through the rolodex of my own memories and how they were organized and why they were organized that way,” McLamb says. Though the entire premise of Good Story can be heady, McLamb writes with such an incisive eye, unvarnished honesty, and self-effacing humor that the project is thematically rich without becoming academic.

For McLamb, Good Story’s thesis statement arrives in “Every Year,” when she sings: “My stories kept me safe but now I understand/ A story is a lifeboat and sometimes there is land.” By zooming out, McLamb spends Good Story turning experiences over into new lights. The earworm chorus of “Like The Boys” looks back on wild teenage years as an attempt to gain agency and control. Other songs close chapters and say goodbye to eras too. “California” is a more sentimental farewell to McLamb’s erstwhile home (it actually predates the more spiteful 2024 single “God Take Me Out Of LA”) that swoons with an arrangement that sits at the intersection of ‘90s pop- and alt-rock.

Elsewhere, “Suffering” is a wry, self-effacing track about one’s tendency to hold their wounds close. It begins with a feint, a baroque piano intro over which McLamb slyly repurposes people’s perceptions of her from the Going Through It era — she goes from a “poor maudlin child” to singing about getting off on suffering over giant, scuzzy guitars. By the end of the album, McLamb also finds empowerment in it all. “I complain but I love the cage,” she sings in closer “Getting Free.” “I love getting free just because I can.”

“I’ve made so many choices in my life that were ill-advised,” McLamb says. “But one of my favorite things about myself is my courage to leave a situation for something that’s more aligned.” McLamb could’ve taken the “easy” route of rehashing Going Through It for years to come. Instead, Good Story transposes its predecessor’s memoirist approach to a series of multifaceted vignettes. There is no prescribed evolution or end destination, but snapshots of an artist in motion, writing a record about storytelling itself. “It’s an investigation into what a story actually does for me,” McLamb concludes. “The point is that not everything fits into a narrative.” This time around, that’s where McLamb leaves it. These are moments collected, without looking for the big release, the big revelation. This time, the poignance comes in that acceptance, in Good Story saying that, for now: That’s OK. That’s enough.