Mary Timony

Since 1990 · United States

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Mountains (2000)

Mountains, Timony's first record after Helium, trades that band's denser art-rock arrangements for something more spacious and exploratory, her guitar playing given room to wander into modal, almost medieval-sounding runs. "Dungeon Dance" rides a serpentine riff and hushed, incantatory vocal into a chorus that never quite resolves the tension it builds, closer to a spell than a pop song. The record's fantasy imagery and unhurried pacing set it apart from the more direct records that followed. It remains the clearest statement of Timony's own guitar language, unmediated by a band.

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Mary Timony

Mountains · 2000

Mary Timony started playing guitar in Washington DC's hardcore scene as a teenager, going to see Fugazi so often she later told The Hairpin she "went to every show they ever played," absorbing the tense, angular attack the scene prized. She co-founded Autoclave, a short-lived band on Dischord Records, before forming Helium in Boston in 1992, a band that spent the rest of the decade on Matador twisting Timony's fantasy-inflected lyrics and serpentine guitar lines into something closer to art-rock than the era's dominant slacker indie.

After Helium disbanded, Timony began a solo career that opened with Mountains in 2000, before she went on to co-found Wild Flag alongside Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and later Ex Hex, carrying a guitar style that had grown steadily more direct without losing its underlying strangeness. Away from her own bands, she taught guitar lessons to a teenage Lindsey Jordan, who went on to record as Snail Mail and has credited Timony directly as a formative teacher rather than a mere influence.