Lisa Wright

Lisa Wright is a music features editor and freelance journalist whose work centres on detailed, story-driven portraits of artists and the worlds they build around their records. Her coverage is defined by a focus on alternative and pop musicians, treated with the depth and care of long-form profiles rather than quick news hits, and by an instinct for connecting songs to broader cultural, visual and live contexts. Her long tenure with DIY, alongside regular work for other culture and music outlets, gives her a perspective that spans emerging acts, established names and the infrastructure of modern music.

Features and cover stories on alternative and pop artists

Wright’s core work is features on artists working between the mainstream and the leftfield, often taking bands and solo acts with strong creative identities and unpacking how they balance the accessible and the strange.

Her piece on Man/Woman/Chainsaw, framed around the group “finding the sweet spot between the weird and the wonderful,” is typical of her approach: she uses the band’s sound and aesthetic as an entry point to discuss how they fit into a wider alternative scene rather than only listing biographical facts.[input] At DIY she has spent years interviewing major figures, including Paul McCartney, Iggy Pop and Damon Albarn, treating legacy acts with the same conversational, human tone she applies to rising artists. Her work for Music Week includes interviews and profiles with artists such as Kasabian, Sarah Kinsley, Maya Delilah and Ella Eyre, along with “On The Radar” and “Making Waves” features that foreground new talent and the teams behind them.

Across these assignments she tends to structure pieces around an artist’s current project, then widen out to their development, influences and relationship to the industry, giving readers an integrated view of career, craft and context.

Connecting music to culture, visual art and design

A distinctive thread in Wright’s portfolio is the way she treats music as one part of a broader cultural landscape, frequently writing about how sound interacts with visual art, design and interdisciplinary practice. For Wallpaper, she has reported on “the wave of female-led interdisciplinary art” in Reykjavik, using musicians alongside visual artists to map how a scene is being built across different media rather than treating music in isolation. She has highlighted album artwork as a subject in its own right, selecting and discussing records with standout visual identities in a feature on “ten albums [that] had the best artwork of 2025,” and has written about how collaborators such as C Prinz help shape the “gothic new world” around Charli XCX. Other pieces examine joint projects where visual artists and musicians create unique works for charity, and a book documenting Paul McCartney’s 1970s band Wings, showing her interest in the narratives around how music is presented, archived and remembered. This cross-disciplinary focus means her coverage often appeals to readers interested in aesthetics and culture as much as in the music itself.

Live events, festivals and the performance side of music

Wright’s perspective is strongly informed by hands-on work in live music and events, which feeds back into how she writes about performance and audiences. At DIY she has held senior responsibility for features and live events, including helping to start the magazine’s own festival, DIY Alive, and booking stages at major events such as SXSW and All Points East.

Her X posts reflect eight years at the magazine, “30 cover features” and “god knows how many live shows,” underscoring the volume of live coverage and artist interviews she has conducted from the front line of gigs and festivals.

In her freelance work she covers acts whose careers are closely tied to live performance and touring, such as Kneecap’s contentious festival appearances and Inhaler’s emergence with a “huge new album,” treating the stage as central to the story rather than an add-on to studio output. For Music Week, she writes about talent pipelines and the business side of live music, including features on BBC Radio 1’s Sian Eleri and coverage of Women In Music Awards honourees, which often discuss how artists and industry figures use performances, radio and events to build momentum. This blend of editorial and events experience makes her features particularly attuned to how songs land in the room and how careers are built around touring cycles.

Podcasting and formative-years storytelling

Beyond print and digital features, Wright co-hosts Before They Knew Better, DIY’s podcast series that revisits artists’ teenage years to uncover formative experiences behind their later work. Each episode asks guests to bring a photo, a song and an object from their youth, which she uses as prompts to draw out unexpected stories, embarrassments and key turning points that rarely appear in standard press interviews. Episodes with guests such as Carrie Brownstein show her skill at shaping conversations that move from specific memories - Seattle in the 1990s, local scenes, first encounters with bands - to a clearer sense of how those environments formed the artist’s worldview. This format mirrors her written features, where she often situates current releases within longer arcs of personal history and cultural background, reinforcing the idea that the present moment in an artist’s career only makes full sense when read against earlier chapters.

Her podcast and live-event work combine with her freelance features for outlets including The Guardian, NME, ES Magazine, The Observer, Time Out, Wallpaper and The Forty-Five to make a body of coverage that is broad in platform but consistent in its focus on nuanced, personality-driven storytelling.