Ezra Furman is a singer, songwriter and author from Chicago, born in 1986, who first made her name fronting Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, a band formed while she was a student at Tufts University near Boston. The Harpoons’ ramshackle, emotionally raw records won a cult following before Furman struck out on her own.
Day of the Dog, released in 2013 on Bar/None and home to ‘My Zero’, was her breakthrough as a solo artist: a riotous blast of saxophone-driven rock’n’roll and doo-wop that sounded like a bar band channelling the Velvet Underground and early Springsteen. Perpetual Motion People (2015) and the urgent, paranoid Transangelic Exodus (2018) cemented her reputation as one of the most thrilling live performers of her generation.
Her influences are worn proudly. Lou Reed looms largest; in 2018 Furman wrote a book on Transformer for the 33⅓ series. Jonathan Richman, Bruce Springsteen and the girl groups of the early 1960s are all audible too. A practising Jew, she has written frequently about faith, and her lyrics have long explored gender and identity; in 2021 she publicly came out as a trans woman.
Her music reached a vast new audience through the Netflix series Sex Education, which used her songs throughout and for which she wrote and performed much of the soundtrack. Later albums, Twelve Nudes (2019) and All of Us Flames (2022), confirmed her as a singular voice: a rock’n’roller with a scholar’s mind and a punk’s refusal to keep quiet.
