Ada Lea’s new EP lands August 12 on Saddle Creek

Ada Lea has announced the seven-track EP end is a wave, arriving August 12 on Saddle Creek, led by the single “copycat.” The release follows last year’s when i paint my masterpiece, and Ada Lea links the new track’s subject to her reading of Elena Ferrante’s T

Ada Lea is bringing something new into rotation. On August 12, her seven-track EP end is a wave will arrive on Saddle Creek—following last year’s when i paint my masterpiece.

The lead single is “copycat,” and a video for the track has already been shared. The song’s dancey beat carries a buoyant pulse, but the subject matter—drawn from Alexandra Levy’s intimate songwriting world—moves somewhere less simple.

Levy explained the spark for “copycat” in a statement. “On Friendship: In 2020, I’d just finished reading The Neapolitan Quartet (by Elena Ferrante),” she said. She described Lila and Lenu’s relationship as something that echoed the “close and maybe slightly unhealthy friendships” in her own life at the time. In Ferrante’s quartet, Levy said, Lenu is “defined by Lila, her Brilliant Friend.”.

That dynamic. she continued. pulls Lenu into obsession: Lenu becomes preoccupied with what Lila is doing. thinking. and whom she’s loving. while “Lenu mythologizes her. and in so doing diminishes herself and her work.” In Levy’s telling of Ferrante’s four books. the emotional center stays fixed on Lila—“Lila was always the source. never Lenu alone”—until the shift that comes late in the quartet. when Lenu reflects back on her life with Lila.

“So I wrote the ‘copycat’ song about that moment,” Levy said.

The EP itself holds another kind of friction. Levy said she wanted to braid together songs that were cut from when i paint my masterpiece with material she had recorded “a million years ago when I was just a child.” The question. she said. was how they would behave side by side—“The old and the new?. The brave and the haunted?. The impression and the finely sculpted.”.

She also made a specific creative choice about who would shape the sound: Levy decided to mix three of the songs herself, adding the line “(was it a mistake? you tell me…I says).”

Beyond the music, her statement reaches toward an artist’s life under pressure. Levy said she has been thinking about “the kind of artist I’d like to be. and how I’d like to see all artists treated.” She described a future where artists are supported by UBI. imagining “a kind of welfare for the serious artists that are not afraid to play.”.

Her argument is bluntly personal: she said she’s “most at home when [she is] creating and performing. ” and that when she’s not making things. she feels a kind of loss of purpose. She also said it can be “near to impossible” to create while constantly “fighting to protect your energy at every turn. feeling burnt out.”.

With end is a wave set for August 12 on Saddle Creek and “copycat” leading the way. Ada Lea’s next release arrives as more than a follow-up—it’s a record built from old fragments and new decisions. and from the same charged question she brought into the room while writing: what happens to an artist when friendship becomes a kind of orbit.

Ada Lea end is a wave Saddle Creek copycat EP Alexandra Levy Elena Ferrante The Neapolitan Quartet friendship indie music