Art School Girlfriend – Doing Laps
London producer Polly Mackey, who records as Art School Girlfriend, drops “Doing Laps,” the third single from her upcoming album Lean In, out March 11 via Fiction Records. It’s her first album in three years, following 2023’s Soft Landing.
The track is about hating the internet. Mackey explores the fatigue of being an artist in the age of platform capitalism, where not just art but artistic practice gets commodified. It’s a feeling that seems universal right now. “It’s not all doom and gloom though”, she says. “The silver linings appeared in keeping only a half eye on outcome and the whole of my being in the process. Who am I doing it for? Am I doing it for you”?
Musically, “Doing Laps” is subtle and quietly powerful. Mackey blends emotion with experimentation, playing with texture and rhythm while keeping that introspective core intact. She wrote and produced the track herself, with Marika Hackman on guitar.
The album comes from an intense creative period. Last year, Mackey decided to stop releasing music altogether and just kept going to her East London studio to make music for the process itself, not the outcome. “That decision unlocked a period of intense creativity like I’ve never experienced before”, she says. “I got obsessed and very existential. This is the sound of me going deeper, being filled with questions I don’t have the answer to, but maybe figuring out what the point of life is”.
Lean In comprises ten tracks, all recorded and self-produced in her studio. With every release, Mackey sounds more confident and willing to push herself into new spaces. The video for “Doing Laps” was directed by Zak Watson.
