You may think that Alex Winston is a promising indie riser. Her flaming album cover makes it look like she is a wild torchbearer for lovers of the newest indie folk. The opening cut “Stassia” sounds as if we’ve just discovered a new alt-country wunderkind who elegantly mixes catchy pop choruses with Fleet Foxes-evoking howls, the synths and echoey production of the early Killers, and the whole baggage of the heritage of American music. However, she has been in the game since 2007 and has already undergone a lot of plot twists—major-label hell, failed release of a debut record, cancellation of a completed second one, forming pop side project—only to finally be reborn as a nascent indie phenom that we see on her long-coming follow-up record Bingo! The “reverse Benjamin Button”, as she calls that.
“Winston has had an unusual life journey,” says Larry McClain in Beats Per Minute, and this is a perfect starting point for a review, so let’s begin there. After some experience in a local Detroit band, she started writing demos in her dad’s basement and recorded her debut EP in GarageBand. Then everything changed in just one year. Winston moved from Michigan to New York, released a few EPs, got an “America’s bright hope” label from the Guardian, and, at the age of 22, signed to Island Records UK, an imprint of Universal Music. That secured “a pretty decent budget” for her debut full-length venture, which she worked on with producer Charlie Hugall (Halsey, Florence + The Machine, Ed Sheeran).
In contrast, Bingo! was made and produced almost entirely by Alex Winston herself—not without the help of producer Thomas Onebane, of course, but without a nearly Broken Social Scene-scale band with backup singers and Sarah Goldstone on keyboards, and without music video blockbusters like the glossy and theatrical “Velvet Elvis”. Although her old music videos still look excellent and modern, a closer look reveals a noticeable discrepancy between the Tori-Amos-wannabe video sequence and the anti-pigeonholed music. In “Sister Wife”, it’s almost tangible how hard producers wanted her video to resemble Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” while Winston was trying to pay tribute to the iconic Japanese B-horror movie House.
For Bingo!, she filmed only one tight-budget music video for “Where My Cowboys At?” which evokes either Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die or Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and represents her passion for horrors and offbeat cinema. This single leads us to one crucial topic in her career—forward-thinking. Let’s start by unraveling this thought with the fact that, for example, she began reviving the popularity of white-sheeted ghosts in pop culture long before David Lowery, Angela Deane, Phoebe Bridgers, and Taylor Swift (and yes, we remember Deadmau5 as well). She was also among the first trendsetters of “Brat Summer”. Considering that she worked on her new album over the last three years and began it with the aforementioned “Where My Cowboys At?”, this theory seems highly realistic. “I’m dancing up against the living dead / I can’t be the only brat living in the past / So where my cowboys at?” she sings there.
If you Google her name, the first suggestions will be, “What happened to Alex Winston?” and, er, “Why did Alex break up with Winston?” For this piece, I’ll focus on answering the first question. In 2013, a year after her indie pop debut King Con came out, Dan Ozzi stated in Noisey that it “should have been the biggest album of 2012”. However, “it came out and just nothing happened”, recalls Winston. One can assume that it simply got wedged in among the year’s fruitful releases like Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange or Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel… At the same time, it’s hard to say there was an intense competition during the week of King Con’s release—from 4-10 March, the world heard not the best albums from the Magnetic Fields, Pond, and Xiu Xiu, along with two powerful ones: The Men’s Open Your Heart and Julia Holter’s Ekstasis. You would say there was not much to struggle with for the audience’s attention, but there was something else.
As our longtime buddy Ozzi notes, the main cause was “a perfect storm of bad timing, poor management, and shit luck”. “It was a lot of fuckery and confusion and disorganization,” says Alex Winston about the operation of her labels at the time. “No one even knew it came out,” she laughs. They even didn’t manage to organize a tour. It seems like Island Records didn’t see the potential of the record and had no clue how to promote it, so she was quickly downstreamed to V2/CoOp, which flopped exactly at that time. That led to the collapse of the PR company. “The record came out, but there was no budget to promote it,” she says. Now is the perfect time to tell how Winston rose from the ashes after this disaster and recorded the album about a new dive into the uncertainty of adult and independent life (from both major labels and a love partner). Yet, the flop of her debut was just the beginning of her dark period, or “swamp era”, as she puts it.
“I express myself through humor in a lot of these songs,” says Winston about the mostly ironic but honest and defiant lyrics of Bingo! Written during the course of three years of discomfort and recorded between Music City and La La Land, they also keep a lot of the frustrations and disappointments of King Con era. “And if I’m looking happy / Well that’s in your head / Cause I store my sorrows,” she sings in the deceptively laid-back “The Cutting Board”. “You can’t take my joy away / Hello Satan, not today,” she concludes in the Lorde-meets Oasis or the Beatles’ “Come Together” lead single “Hot One”. “It’s a glimpse of knowing you’re not where you want to be yet, but you’re in the process,” she says of the album’s central theme.
There’s even a tune called “Swampland”, which circles back to the previous paragraph. “It’s whatever / Nothing lasts forever”, Winston confidently sings over David Bowie-esque guitar with a bold and assertive approach straight out of St. Vincent’s playbook, almost quoting Margarita from Mikhail Bulgakov’s iconic novel The Master and Margarita.
With this comeback, Alex Winston has completely reinvented her musical approach, heading in a more DIY and personal direction. This is rooted in the past. Years ago, while she was compared to Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom, her debut record fueled speculation that she would be the next Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, Anne Clark, or even Katy Perry. The problem is that critics didn’t have enough vocabulary to describe her music back then. Only the next decade showed that Winston made it by the rules of the future. Her music, inspired by “weird documentaries and a lot of voyeuristic things”, as she puts it, was extremely catchy but strange and bizarre—it didn’t fit any familiar genre years before Masseduction, Pang, or A. G. Cook-produced projects. So, someone at the label probably decided that toasts flying from a possessed toilet, a snake, and the Seven Old Men and a Girl trope would be enough to fit this strangeness. If all of that were released today, she would immediately become a pop phenom.
A “three-year label purgatory” is what Emilee Lindner from Noisey called what came next. A few years after the botched rollout of her debut, Winston signed to 300 Entertainment, now a Warner Music imprint, and released the EP called The Day I Died in 2015, symbolizing her rebirth after previous turmoils. These three songs were supposed to become part of her second album, which was ready to roll but got shelved by label guys. Soon after, she was dropped from 300. “It made me scared to put out music again,” she says, calling that a “weird creative block”. Alex Winston took a long hiatus from solo work after the second (or third) record-label breakup. It was around this time that she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which she battled for the next two years.
“It’s a special kinda feeling / I just want everyone to need me,” she sings with her operatic vocal on the verge of Maisie Peters‘ delivery in the Boss-indebted, spacious “Special Feeling”, adding, “I just want everyone to see me”. Another interesting line goes, “I scream, and I shout cause no one tells me to stop / I run the baby down until the wheels fall off”. In some way, it can be perceived as a revelation about her work on Bingo! without the “outside voices” of label big shots telling her what to do and when to scream. During the last 12 years, Winston consciously and subconsciously ran her baby album down, pushing her creative energy to the limit until the wheels fell off or someone appreciated her work. This is a truly special feeling you can only understand by being reborn.
One of Alex Winston’s cures became a synth-pop side project, Post Precious, which she started in 2017 with a friend and producer, Max Hershenow, who had also gone through a similar label horror story with Lizzy Plapinger from their MS MR duo, separating from Columbia Records. “So Max and I started writing for fun,” Winston recalls. By then, her joint act with Hershenow was a big deal, praised by Billboard and supported by Charli XCX, who gave them “studio space and a lot of support and feedback”. It’s easy to see why, just by watching the chic music video for their key banger, “Timebomb”. Besides the phoenix rising story arc, this bio excerpt is also essential for understanding the roots of electronica subtle elements incorporated into Winston’s folky songwriting. This “fun dance music”, as she calls it, had a therapeutic effect, which probably helped her to rise again.
After the labels’ failure to promote her debut record and a year of rumination about that, Alex Winston began thinking about releasing her next record independently on her own Rat Rizzo Records. Post Precious’s experience of independence showed her the attractiveness of making music without pressure and “middle-aged man’s feedback”. Now, we see that it took her more than a decade and “years of therapy”, according to her words, to sit down in a studio again. Yet, now, she is the one who is responsible for her decisions. “It just feels really good to put music out again, and I’m the only one I have to answer to,” she told her (and already our) longtime friend Dan Ozzi for his newsletter Zero Cred. As we know now, Chris Farren’s indie show, which he performed almost entirely on his own, was another inspiration for her to come back—or to become “the comeback kid,” as Sharon Van Etten might put it.
As with the themes accumulating in her mind and notebook for the past decade, the same can be said about the sound of Bingo! It’s a delightfully scrappy hotch-potch of sonics we have heard over the last 12 years—from pure Bridgerscore mixed with a giant Green Day-like chorus in “Indiana” to the highly comical “Nanananananananana” in “Run On” in the vein of Tessa Violet, Claire Rosinkranz, or Lauran Hibberd.
Alex Winston says her experience is not exceptional, but I think it is. I was keen to write this review partly because of her unprecedented story of multiple falls with a happy ending. A year after the failed marketing campaign for King Con, primarily aimed at the UK, she told the press that, actually, that record was very American. I think that her entire life story is American. Sorry for such pathos, but as President Biden used to say, “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
Hence, after an almost 20-year odyssey in the music industry, it would be a terrific move to make a big and outspoken hour-long conceptual album about all the triumphs and setbacks I’ve written about above. However, Alex Winston chose to go with a more compact and intimate record focused on her growth and past relationships, which puts her on par with the best folk albums of this year, like those by Madi Diaz, Marina Allen, Waxahatchee, and Maya Hawke. Apart from her love for the game Bingo, the album’s name signifies her sense of an upcoming breakthrough in her life, and I believe she truly scored a bingo by managing to bounce back after failing from the pop Olympus. Given the gigantic period since her last release, we can easily consider her follow-up full-length a second debut; for that, it’s a tremendous start.