Scrolling through TikTok, you might stumble upon a captivating voice at a piano accompanied by soft relatable lyrics— that’s Avery Lynch. The rising pop artist has transformed her viral moments into a flourishing music career, with her latest release, “the boys who don’t know what they want,” poised to elevate her career as her most pre-saved song to date.
Hailing from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Lynch grew up immersed in music and developed a passion for songwriting early in life. After graduating from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, she combined her classical training with a modern pop sensibility, creating a sound uniquely her own. Her breakthrough came on TikTok in 2020, where Lynch’s raw, emotional lyrics and intimate piano-driven performances resonated with millions, quickly propelling her into the spotlight. With over 100 million streams across platforms, Lynch has garnered a fandom across her platforms.
Lynch’s ability to connect with her audience extends beyond her music, shining through in the way she creates personal experiences for her fans. This was especially evident during her “Hometown Mini Tour” this winter, where she added a cozy twist to her shows by sharing Swiss Miss hot chocolate with attendees. In the midst of her December travels across the East Coast to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, Lynch took time to dive deeper into her artistry.
In an interview with ECHO, ahead of of her single release, she shared insights into the creative process behind her latest track, the emotional depth that defines her songwriting, and the inspiration she draws from BookTok, films, and her own life experiences.
You’re releasing “the boys who don’t know what they want” on Friday. How are you feeling about the release?
I’m feeling good. It’s much better now that TikTok is not banned at the moment. That timing would have been tough, but I’m feeling good. This is my most pre-saved song to date, which is great. Not that that ever really means that much, but I think it’s a win. A win is a win. It’s always scary releasing songs. It’s just that having all the statistics and data of everything you do for your job public is not for the weak. I do not like that anyone I’ve ever known can see exactly how I’m doing. So that makes releasing a little bit scary every time. But overall, I’m super excited. I love this song. I posted it a long time ago, and it did well. I was like, oh, okay, I’m gonna hold on to that. And I’m not gonna post it again until I know we’re within a month of it coming out so that I don’t use it all up.
TikTok has played a huge role in jumpstarting your career. How do you balance creating content for that platform while still trying to create your own image that’s unique to you?
When I’m creating content for that platform, I just try to make it very much me. I try to make it all match. I don’t do anything that I wouldn’t actually be comfortable doing. It actually seems like the performance videos are the ones that are coming back, which is great because I love those. Those always feel very authentic. It’s just me. I put up my phone, and sing my little song. I have to move it over to a different software to turn up the volume because my voice is this big and nobody can hear me. Then I just get to add the words and make a funny blurb or whatever. It doesn’t feel like a lot of extra work, especially since I’ve been doing it for over four years. Part of the day to day is that I should probably post a video because it’s been a couple of days. Honestly the TikTok photo posts are my favorite because you can do them in a second, and then it might do well, and it might not, who cares?
Speaking of the performance TikToks, you just finished doing some live shows, including one in Boston. What was that like? And can we see a more extended tour after you release this new music?
That tour was great. It was really fun. It was very DIY. I put it together with my sister, who’s a photographer, my boyfriend, who’s my producer, and we had my team, but we were the ones on the road, it was the three of us, and with cars full of stuff that we rented and we made it happen, and it was very stressful, but wow it was very rewarding having a room of people who are there for me. I’ve never really done that I’ve always been the opener, and I’m comfortable as the opener. I like being the opener, and it’s very safe you don’t have to be I’m worried about most things. But it’s very rewarding to be the person they’re there for. I had a great time. The hot chocolate stuff was so fun. Swiss Miss sending us literally eight canisters of massive hot chocolate mix. I have a box over there in the corner with four canisters left. I’ve been trying to give gifts to family members here and there. But it was a lot of fun. I want to do a longer, more extended tour in the future. I would love to open for somebody. I’m currently kind of afraid of headlining in many places, but I love doing the shows, meeting the fans, and doing all that stuff. So that’s definitely something that I want to do.
You mentioned that your boyfriend is your producer and you just celebrated your five-year anniversary. Congratulations! A lot of your music tends to be very sad. How do you pull the emotion of sadness into your songs while being in a happy relationship?
He wrote “the boys who don’t know what they want” with me. You’re 100% right; a lot of my songs are about breakups and other things. I don’t know what it is. I love those very real, almost heartbreaking, tragic love scenarios. I love unrequited love. I’m very fascinated by it. Not that I love it. It’s just for whatever reason. It’s so interesting to me. I’m just obsessed with it. I wanna hear all about it. My favorite movies are 500 Days of Summer and Little Women, which are literally prime examples of unrequited love.
My other favorite movie genre type is biopics, which is very specific, but I love the realness of this person being in this relationship with this person. It was messy, and they kept coming in and out. They were in this relationship with this person, but then they came back to this person. I don’t know what it is, but the not-so-clean-cut love story things that end up maybe being tragic or maybe end up being just love stories are just so interesting. I just love human relationships. I’m obsessed with it, so I always write about it.
I write about my own experiences. Many of them are, funnily enough, not romantic experiences, but relationships are so parallel that you can make, like my song, “useless Information,” that came out with my “Friction” EP, which was about my managers. They had all this information about me because they were my managers, but we no longer work together. That was weird to me. So I wrote a song that sounds like a breakup song about this person I was with who I know all these things about, and I don’t know them anymore. It was just like them. But relationships have so many parallels that you can write a breakup song about yourself and an inanimate object.
Like I wrote, I wrote, I’m sorry, sorry it had to be you about me and music. And it sounds like a breakup song. I don’t know what it is. I just love framing everything like that. My family members and my friends kind of lean into it, and they’re like, I’m going through this breakup, this is it. Can you write this for me? Can you write this about me? And so my next song after “the boy who don’t know what they want” is about a family member of mine and their breakup. I don’t know what it is. I just love doing it. It’s just so fun. But I’m very happy. I’m in a great relationship, and I love it.
You love telling stories. I can see all the books behind you. Are you on BookTok? Have you read any books specifically that are popular that pulled inspiration from a chapter or the plot.
I am on BookTok. I love reading. I’m a Kindle girlie. I have a bunch of books stacked underneath these little houses. But they just kind of help give me more, more of an in-depth, detailed perspective of something that I might already know about if that makes sense. My favorite book is Before We Were Strangers by Renée Carlino. I read it a few years ago; it was my immediate favorite. I need to read it again. That book felt like a movie to me. I love when books feel like movies because I’m naturally a movie person.
They just like to hit so much harder. Watching certain relationships unravel and become, you’re so in it like it’s you. It does so much to create that sort of empathy that helps me be able to write about things that I may not have experienced or have experienced in a tidbit. I’m also just somebody who very easily can put myself in a different pair of shoes when it comes to relationships specifically, just because I have people that I love and I have people that I hate. If you have both of those things and people that you’re indifferent about, you can kind of put yourself in any scenario of thinking, but what if this thing happened to this person? What if this thing happened to this person? What if this ended up happening? You can immediately kind of pretend it’s happening in real life. So my song, “somebody new,” was written with Little Women in mind. I was imagining the hill scene while I was writing it. So, if anything, it would probably be Little Women.
Your new song is called “the boys who don’t know what they want.” Based on the snippets that you have been putting out, the title is very evocative. You’re exactly saying what it is. What message are you hoping to convey through the song?
I kind of wanted to do something that’s a little bit more matter-of-fact because I have my song, “you’re just a guy,” and that struck home with a lot of people because that is your viewpoint of, see, oh, this is actually what’s going on with this person I’m not in love with them they just gave me attention. “The boys who don’t know what they want” is kind of like the sister song of “you’re just a guy” a little bit. Still, it’s a little bit more matter of fact it’s a little bit more like self-removed because I wrote “you’re just a guy” from the standpoint of when I went through that experience, and then I came out of that experience, and that’s all it was. That’s what that attraction was. It was just attention and the hopefulness and promise. It’s nothing tangible, nothing real. Boys who don’t know what they want are very matter-of-fact; this is a thing that guys do. That is a thing girls do, too. It’s just like for me, since I’m the writer, since I’m the person who came up with it, my perspective it’s the boys who don’t want to.
How has your sound evolved since you started producing music with your boyfriend? In what ways do you feel you’ve grown as an artist through collaborating with him, especially considering how your music has shifted over time?
We’ve both just been challenging each other to try new things, which is normal because you get older and want to try new things and whatnot. He was originally a hip-hop producer, and I just played the piano and sang. When he started working with me because we were dating, I wrote a song or did a cover, whatever it was, and I wanted to do something with it. He was like, well, let’s do something with it. I have the skill set to do that. I’ve just never done it like this.
We blended the two, and we made a written volume one. And then I’ve gone more into production, and I play a few more instruments, and he plays a few more. He’s really started leaning into the singer-songwriter world because, all of these new girls are coming out, and they’re like, hey, I like this sound, can I make this with you? And so now he’s fully a singer-songwriter-producer and engineer because his other thing is engineering, and he does all of my engineering, which is like mixing and mastering. He does it for Devon Gabriella and for like a bunch of other artists. It’s like his favorite thing to do. But for this next project, we have come together and started trying new things. So my next song after “the boys who don’t know what they want” is “think about it”. I haven’t told anybody that yet, but it was initially just a piano song.
We wrote it together, me, him, and Neisha Grace; the three of us also wrote “the boys who don’t know what they want.” We thought we should add stuff to it. Why not? And so we did, added a bunch of stuff to it, and did that with the next song. Then, we wrote this other song and we added a bunch of stuff to that. So, we’ve just been having a lot of fun producing and writing together. We always kind of had our separate things. “The boys don’t know what they want” is the very first song that he’s written on. He’s never touched the lyrics of a song before. But he did so good. I wrote, “they’re kind, and they’re careful.” And he said, “They show up but not all the way.” And I was like, you’re kidding me. Are you serious? That’s the first line you’ve ever written in your life. That’s amazing. So we’re having a lot of fun writing and producing together. It’s been really, really great.
You pair your music with very distinctive visuals. Do you envision them before you write the song or after you put the project together?
The song is 100% first, and then I have to sit with it and imagine visuals.
For my song “Rain,” I thought, “What does the song feel like?” We were like, “Why don’t we just take the picture on our bed?” We’re going to mess up the sheets, throw a bunch of my clothes all over it, and I’m going to lie there depressed in my jeans because I’m going out, but I don’t want to. I like it when things feel like or look like stills from movies.
I’m just a huge movie person. So when things feel like a movie or look like a movie or anything like that, that’s perfect. The cover of “Rain” really felt like it captured this moment of that feeling that the whole song conveys. So I just try to match the feelings together. The cover of “the boys who don’t know what they want” is a picture taken back in 2022. It’s the only time I’ve ever done that and taken a photo from a different shoot. We are going to be working with a creative director next week, Gus Black. He did the “somebody new” music video and took the photos of me that I used for the mini tour. And for my artist photos, he ended up taking those.
Then, “the boys who don’t know what they want” needed the song and cover as we were leaving to drive home to Pennsylvania. I’m in California, and we drive across the country to Pennsylvania. We were driving home for the holidays and the mini tour. And I was like, I don’t have time to figure out shoots. I was going through every photo I had on my laptop, and I found these pictures of me lying in the grass at a photo shoot with a photographer I work with all the time, named Zian. He did my “Friction” cover art, and he’s done a bunch of stuff for me, and he’s incredible, and I was like, I never use these grass photos. This is great. It’s so miscellaneous. You have no idea when it was taken, so that’s what we did.
I’ve never scraped together a cover like that before. And it feels almost wrong, but it turned out cute. I did the ”boys that don’t know what they want” font. It’s just my handwriting. It’s me on my iPad, writing with my finger because my Apple pencil was dead. I was like that looks cute, I’ll leave it. Then that was the cover. We just kind of like scraping things together for this one. “Rain” was a little very much thought out, just like post-production, post all of that.
I know you have many friends you work with now, and your boyfriend also works with you. Do you happen to have a dream collaborator?
I have a few of my favorite artists. My top two are Sara Bareilles and Sleeping At Last. I would pass away immediately if I did anything with Sara Bareilles. If I met her…I would be afraid that I would scare her away because she’s the only person that I would feel that kind of fan thing with. I’m not a fangirl. When I see people I’ve seen online, I think “you’re real person.” But I’ve never idolized somebody. But for whatever reason, this will sound so crazy; Sara Bareilles feels like this long-lost aunt figure to me. I’ve grown up with her. I learned how to write from her. I learned how to perform from her. I got into piano from her. So, it feels like this kind of untouchable, almost God-like person that I would like to sob if I met her in person, but my life would be complete. She would be like collaborator number one if I were strong enough.
Number two would probably be Sleeping At Last. I love him. I was just so changed by every single lyric that he wrote. It taught me that I never want to be somebody who has any fluff in their songs. I want to ensure that every line I write has a purpose. I was just completely obsessed with him, and even DM’d him. He’s never going to see it. But I DM’d him just to say I just want to thank you. He’s somebody who I like would just die to freaking collaborate with. There are so many other people that I look up to, and I would completely melt if I had any opportunity to work with them. There are so many that it would be like a laundry list. Still, I’m very inspired by so many people around me. Nobody’s ever asked me to collaborate with them, so anybody would be so cool.
As this release comes out on Friday, and you’re planning the future, what’s next after this release?
I really want to do an album because I’ve just done EPs for a while. I’ve done EPs for a while because that’s kind of what song term lengths are normally requested for. They want eight songs. That’s not quite an album that’s definitely an EP, it’s just sort of longer. And that’s the way it’s always been kind of spelled out. Then I had “Friction,” and the whole “Friction” release was completely independent. It was just Jordan and me alone, with with no management. We were like, well, I’m not confident or comfortable enough to make an album. I don’t have the funding to make an album at the moment. So I’m just gonna like to do one song at a time.
That’s why it was a collection: because I was just doing one song as I did it and then releasing it. Right now, I have this one more EP, and then I see if I get an deal and what that deal entails. Otherwise, I would love to make an album. I would love it if what I was doing right now was an album, but that’s just not the way it works all the time. So an album is definitely the goal. I’m a little fatigued by the EPs at the moment. I have so many EPs and I have so many songs.
Since this is East Coast Hollywood, which also is “ECHO,” if you could “ECHO” out any message to your fans, what would it be?
I love them so much. I’m very close to them. I respond to every person who DMs me and talk to them. They’re my friends. They feel like a little family. I don’t know what I would do without them. I’m a person who hates leaving my house. So, people showing up and leaving their house for me is the biggest compliment ever. I guess it’s just kind of the notion of I see, and I appreciate every single effort, no matter how big or small. Everything everyone does in support of me does not go unnoticed, and I would do anything for them. I hope they enjoy the shows even though they’re mainly just acoustics and me singing and playing piano. But one day, we’ll have a band or something, but for now, they are so sweet for coming and just singing along to me by myself.
As Lynch sets her sights on an album and continues exploring new creative avenues, her dedication to meaningful storytelling and heartfelt music remains at the core of her artistry. With the newly released “the boys who don’t know what they want” and a steady stream of projects on the horizon, she’s poised to keep captivating audiences with her vulnerability and originality.
Keep up with Lynch on TikTok at @avelynch and Instagram at @averylynchh. Her new release “the boys who don’t know what they want” is available to stream on all platforms now.