At just 33-years old, Ohio native Lydia Loveless already has an impressive body of work, and they showed it off recently during a great set at The Atlantis in DC. It was their first headlining appearance in the DMV in several years; they last played in the area when they opened for the Drive-By Truckers at the 9:30 Club.

It makes sense that Lydia would’ve opened for the Truckers, as they overlap stylistically. Though they have broadened their sound to embrace a wider range of pop, there’s still plenty of twang in Loveless’s songs. Their mix of twang and punk rock energy endeared them to Chicago indie label Bloodshot Records, who are known for championing what they called “insurgent country.”

Loveless and I share roots in the Buckeye State. I was born in Kansas City and grew up in the suburbs of Akron. Coshocton, the town from which Lydia hails, is a very different part of Ohio, a small rural town in the central part of the state. Loveless was homeschooled and grew up in a musical family, playing in a band with their siblings and their father. They’ve spoken about how stifling life was in that small town. I can only imagine; I grew up in a much more cosmopolitan setting, but Fairlawn, Ohio, was hard enough for me. At 14, Lydia moved to Columbus. By the age of 20, they’d released their first album, The Only Man, and, the following the year, they put out Indestructible Machine on the Bloodshot label.

While there are plenty of songs about liquor and broken hearts in Loveless’s catalog, what sets them apart is their ability to be literary without being pretentious. At The Atlantis on Dec. 4, Lydia kicked off their encore with “Verlaine Shot Rimbaud,” a song about a domestic spat between two nineteenth-century French symbolist poets that begins, “Verlaine shot Rimbaud because he loved him so.”

Watch Lydia Loveless perform “Verlaine Shot Rimbaud” live for Audiotree on YouTube:

Lydia has plenty of tough life experiences to channel into their songs. They married, then divorced their bass player, after which they relocated to North Carolina. They were also sexually harassed by one of the founders of Bloodshot, one of many sundry incidents that harmed the reputation of the label at the end of last decade. Those issues led to them leaving the label after releasing a compilation, Boy Crazy and Singles, in 2017, and putting out 2020’s Daughter on their own Honey, You’re Gonna Be Late label. Meanwhile, Bloodshot was sold to new ownership, and Loveless returned to the indie label with this year’s Nothing’s Gonna Stand In My Way Again.

Loveless is somewhat famous, or infamous, for their lack of filter. In 2016, The Ringer published a feature on them titled, “Lydia Loveless is going to punch you in the mouth.” While they don’t throw any punches at The Atlantis Monday night, there was a moment — and I missed what prompted this — when they said, “You should see my tits,” to which I shouted back, “This is not that kind of show!”

While Loveless’s albums have consistently earned critical praise, their most recent LP, this year’s Nothing’s Gonna Stand In My Way Again, has earned them some of their strongest critical praise of their career. The songs are fantastic, and the sound is bolder and more expansive than anything they’ve done before. It’s not a departure, but rather an expansion of their earlier work, a direction they’ve always been headed in. Allmusic compared the sound to early Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, and it’s not entirely crazy to label the record as at least adjacent to heartland rock.

Loveless opened their set with a track from that album, “Poor Boy,” followed by two more cuts, “Sex and Money” and “Runaway.”

Watch the official music video for “Sex and Money” by Lydia Loveless on YouTube:

The set also included “Ghost,” whose lyrics lend the album its title, as well as ” “Toothache,” “Do the Right Thing,” and “French Restaurant.” During a solo section of the show, Lydia played another couple of tracks from the album, “Feel” and “Summerlong,” and the old favorite “More Like Them.” The set included plenty of old favorites: “Can’t Think,” “Say My Name,” “Don’t Bother Mountain,” “Bilbao,” and “Longer.” They finished the set with “Wine Lips” and finished the encore with “Head,” a sad song about oral sex.

Singer-songwriter Reese McHenry started the evening with a solo acoustic set. Her songs included “Flower In The Dark,” “Liz Phair’s Johnny” (based on a character from Phair’s seminal album Exile in Guyville), the unreleased “Ellis Island,” “I Do What I Want,” and “Summer Sheets.” Introducing “Mississippi Blue,” she explained that she has congestive heart failure and has a pacemaker. She also mentioned being from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the headwaters of the big river. She also praised Loveless’s audiences as being extremely respectful of her opening sets.

On their social media, and at the show, Loveless mentioned they had gotten food poisoning earlier in the day. Remarkably, they showed no signs of struggle or fatigue and delivered a banger of a show.

Here are some photos of Lydia Loveless performing at The Atlantis in DC on Dec. 4, 2023. All pictures copyright and courtesy of David LaMason.