‘It’s rational to fear the music industry’: Grouper’s Liz Harris on virality, streaming scammers and her ‘restorative’ dream-pop trio

In mid-September, I watched as Liz Harris soundchecked to 1,500 empty seats at midtown Manhattan’s historic Town Hall theatre. Soon each plush red chair would be filled for the second of two sold-out nights, but this ornate seclusion felt oddly perfect. It is fair to infer that most of her concertgoers generally listen to the uncanny experimental music she makes as Grouper alone, just as she creates it.

Harris started Grouper in 2005 in the DIY noise warehouses of Oakland, California. At 46, she now lives farther north, in coastal Astoria, Oregon, where she creates densely tessellated visual art and spare, lucid albums that have made her a titan of modern ambient music. Painfully beautiful and often inscrutable, hers is a sonic language all its own, creating thickets of sound using little more than guitar or piano, voice and space; her angelic and alien songs have influenced artists as disparate as Phoebe Bridgers and Mk.gee, and been sampled by Lil B and 100 Gecs. It is intensely solitary work, often characterised as sad but full of profound relief. “Like a bloodletting,” Harris offers.

Harris reflects on its origins in the abstract drone of her 2005 debut Way Their Crept. “I thought there was some really dark part of me, and I was trying to understand it and incorporate it,” she says now. She is uneasy being the face of her music and generally keeps herself at arm’s length from the industry. “I’ve always been backing away from that,” she says, preferring to remind herself before shows “that we’re all in the room together”.

When Harris and I meet at her Williamsburg hotel prior to the show, she’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Birth Ends in Death”, merch from her friend and occasional collaborator, the ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In addition to these milestone Grouper shows – coming five years after her last album, Shade – we’re speaking in light of the second record by Helen, the dream-pop trio in which she sings and plays guitar alongside drummer Jed Bindeman, who runs Portland shop Little Axe Records, and bassist Scott Simmons, also of lo-fi band the Lavender Flu. Their new album, Linda’s Head, like their 2015 debut The Original Faces, evokes scrappy Flying Nun indie-pop remade in their own stark Pacific Northwest image. But there’s a striking clarity and weight to the new one. If Grouper is the sound of a woman singing to herself, on Linda’s Head, she sings out.

Helen’s appeal, for Harris, is in part its collectivity. “I get to relax more in Helen,” she says. “It feels as if I get to show a side of myself that I’ve always had, but that doesn’t get to show through Grouper, which is that I like having fun and I like my friends. I’m not just in the corner crying,” she says with a hearty laugh. Helen has a “bright energy”, she says, but, as with Grouper, a darkness gently haunts the music and Harris’s beguiling layered harmonies. The band’s name references Washington’s Mount St Helen, the site of a deadly volcanic eruption shortly before Harris was born in 1980, and it also alludes to a childhood spectre. “When I was a total loner social reject in junior high, I was trying to talk to ghosts all the time,” says Harris. “I thought I was talking to a ghost named Helen that lived in my house.”

The songs consider what Harris calls “ecstatic nihilism” in a brutal world. “We’re all going through this time where things are really fucked up – it’s the war on Gaza and straight-up fascism in this country,” she says of the US. “There’s this urge to escape, but at the same time, a very pressing urge to be present and have community.” She hears both on Linda’s Head, and says the collaborative process of making the music lifted her spirits during a time when she was navigating medical difficulties. “Jed would be like, ‘Come on, let’s practise,’ and I’d drag my feet there. I’d always leave thinking, ‘Thank God I did that.’ It was really restorative.”

In conversation, Harris is gracious and direct – she sounds as comfortable discussing her art, process and many tattoos as she does politics and music-industry corruption – which may surprise those who know her through her often cryptic music. Touring and performing like this is daunting for her, but she’s enjoying it. She says she’s been feeling more “integrated” lately, which she hears in Helen.

A pair of songs on Linda’s Head, Dead Shark and Dead Shark II (alternate versions of the same tune), are disarmingly vibrant for Harris, despite their morbid origins. They were inspired by an actual shark Harris saw one day at the coast when she was feeling especially low. She observed its large, lifeless body floating by. “It distracted me from my own shit, and took me out of my headspace, this poor creature,” she says. “The song is about connecting and the process of feeling bad and going out into nature and letting it change you.”

The macabre titles recall Harris’s 2008 breakthrough, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, when she pivoted from abstract noise to acoustic, subtle art songs. That earlier title derived from a core childhood memory: Harris encountered a dead deer in the woods with a friend who dared her to hoist it up a hill. It incited a realisation about her agency in the world, and later inspired a title about the process of unburdening yourself of the past.

When she was two years old, Harris’s parents were among the many seeking structure after the chaos of post-hippy late-60s San Francisco. The family moved from nearby Bolinas, where her father built houses with back-to-the-lander Lloyd Kahn, to a Fourth Way commune in Sonoma County. They joined a spiritual group – called the Group – where kids defiantly referred to the initiated as “groupers”. Harris still has friends from then: “There was a grouper at the show last night.”

The adults enacted the Group’s dogma on to children who were shuffled between households. Theoretically, they followed the teachings of famed mystic Gurdjieff. Harris was told that they were real people, but most of the world was asleep. “It was so confusing, and actually just instilled terror in me,” she says. “It made me terrified of other people, but also terrified of, how do I make sure that I stay real? I can’t become one of the sleepers.” I ask if this affected 2008’s Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping, still her signature song, but she says that was about a depressive period and retreating into her “very active dream world”.

Making music in her 20s was a way to begin processing it all. “I would still call it a cult,” she says of the Group, “and what happened was exploitative. But it’s not holding my focus in the way that it used to. There were enlightening things and shitty things – all of it led to where I’m at now. I still have my existential crises, but I’m pretty happy at the place I’ve landed.”

Harris helps to maintain that balance by avoiding the music industry, but during the pandemic, she became caught in the undertow of a uniquely modern phenomenon when her 2008 rarity Poison Tree went viral. Harris wrote the gothic hymn in her mid-20s after relocating to Portland and feeling intensely isolated. “I went dark with it: I’ve never been able to connect with people. There’s something wrong with me, and people can see it,” she recalls. “I was having self-punishing thoughts and then trying to process it and turn it into something more expansive or rational-minded.”

The song’s unlikely TikTok moment means “there’s this younger generation of really sweet, rad, open-minded kids” newly discovering Grouper, says Harris. She delights in recounting how her friends’ teenage children are now independently getting into her work.

This current Grouper tour has been Harris’s first time “out in the world” since the song “fluffed up, or whatever you want to call it”, she says. “I hate saying ‘gone viral’.” She was late to learning about Poison Tree’s second life; she pays little attention to stats and doesn’t know how to look them up. When Brian Foote, head of her label Kranky, first told her that Poison Tree had accrued 20m plays (it now has more than 300m on the world’s biggest music streamer) she told him, “‘Well, that’s weird because I haven’t even put that on digital.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, that’s why I’m telling you.’”

The song had been fraudulently registered and uploaded by someone else and had already earned around six figures. Fortunately, since that person used the same distribution platform as Harris, she and Foote were able to shut down the scammer and get back what she was owed.

As an independent artist, Harris has learned first-hand that an elevated digital profile comes with a range of new concerns – like fake remixes and songs posted with the same titles as hers by bad actors trying to skim whatever royalties they can. “You have to spend all this stupid energy whack-a-mole-ing” these infringing tracks, she says. “I have learned that people think [streaming] platforms are a lot more regulated than they are. It is not regulated. I think it’s rational that I have a fear of immersing myself more into the music industry.”

As Harris’s self-contained world expands – her label YellowElectric, her zine Presence, plus the gallery, Anita, she occasionally runs from her studio – her independence feels heroic. She carries a sweatshirt repping Portland punk legends Dead Moon to our interview, a fitting nod to her regional DIY forebears. Those ideals feel of a piece with Helen’s graceful, threadbare sound, too. “I’ve always adamantly wanted to be a balanced person,” she says. “In my 30s, I toured too much and got burnt out. I thought, ‘I want to have other things I’m doing. I don’t want to get stuck in a corner.’ In some ways, that still happens, but I’m intentional about having a full life.”

On her current tour, she channels older material through this light. The first song of her set is Invisible, a downcast and tactile acoustic ballad from 2008. The incantatory lyrics – “I’ve become invisible” – seem to temper an innate shyness with the texture of a devotional. When she sings it now, glowing and a cappella, it becomes a “ritual chant” to ground herself.

“It feels more like singing about a special quality, or a superpower,” she says. “I can turn myself invisible – like a person who’s here but isn’t. That could be really dark. Or it could be that I have the power to retreat as I need.”