Recommended tracks: “Love of My Life,” “Devil You Know,” “Great Minds”
Artists you may like: Samia, quinnie, Delaney Bailey
A concept album that narrates the epic fantasy of Maitreya Corso — an alter ego, a magical misfit, a figment of feminine imagination — this LP reinstates Maya Hawke as one of folk pop’s most ambitious storytellers.
While sonically unsurprising and at times indistinguishable from her previous works, its lyricism is pure wordcraft as she asks utterly existential questions in deceptively simple ways. Coming out of a TV series blockbuster to release a 49-minute conceptual record with a title that demands to be pronounced twice, Maya proves herself to be a true indie darling.
Every artistic decision behind MAITREYA CORSO faithfully represents her vision of the project as being about protecting the precious from the poisonous, creation from pride, love from control, collaboration from jealousy. From a self-painted album cover about which she said in an interview with Zane Lowe was to “free herself from the idea of her face” to understated, stripped-down acoustic songs, MAITREYA CORSO is undeniably her best yet.
The first single, “Devil You Know,” delivers a perfect thesis statement of MAITREYA CORSO: “Deal with the devil you know, take it slow / He might show up, you might lose him / When you grow up, you might blow up, you might pop / None of that’s a good reason to stop.” Using the bodily explosion of Maitreya Corso (the creature when faced with a literal devil) to perhaps imply the death of creative drive that Maya was facing at this all-time high of her career is such a smart metaphor. She could choose to stop, to make algorithmic pop and blow up, but instead she took it slow.
The self-confrontational difficulty of doing what you really want, something that seemingly comes naturally to artists, defines the thematic pondering of the record: “What if I got what I wanted? / What if I was who I wanna be? / What if I got what I wanted? / What if I knew how to be?”, she asks in opening track “Love of My Life.” These are, notably, not left unanswered by the end of the record as she tells us in “Dream House”: “I am falling in love with my life” — that the search for the love of her life is not the search for a future with a certain someone, but for a sense of presence with herself.
Maya also explores this journey of learning to aspire without greed, to love without wanting to be loved, to understand without the need to be understood, in “Slacker in the Rye” (“I haven’t done much, but I did it for you”) and “Maitreya and the Way Back” (“…there’s nothing you need that you don’t have right now)”. The former’s title is a spin on J.D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, another great testament to Maya’s songwriting prowess especially if you’ve read the book.
While the idea and literal sonic execution of restraint is not necessarily groundbreaking, pulling it off through the grand concept of a fictional character makes MAITREYA CORSO a worthwhile listen. The parts in which Maya constantly reiterates questions of her existentialism are the parts I find most exciting both lyrically and production-wise, rather than the pre-choruses when she sometimes talk-sings and word-vomits.
Maya’s website is also redesigned as a storymap that follows Maitreya Corso’s adventure from The Secret Portal, The Outpost and The Wishing Well to The Magic Mirror and The Witch Post.
“I hope you like it and that it inspires you to try seeing yourself as a creature of your own imagination. I hope you’ll follow along through the story of this album and the tour here as I am finding all the usual ways to be misery-inducing. And my biggest hope of all is that it inspires you to build your own world in your own head and to do that with artwork of any kind,” she shares on her site.
MAITREYA CORSO is out everywhere now.
Follow Maya Hawke: Instagram // Spotify // Bandcamp // YouTube
