Maya Lucia – sleepy baby club
Similar artists: Snail Mail, Indigo De Souza, Nilufer Yanya, Angel Olsen, Pom Pom Squad
Pop Rock, Indie Pop, Garage Rock
Every generation believes that they are inventing something completely unique, especially when it comes to music. And, in many ways, they are correct! Dreams are born and then die on a daily basis. It’s these dreams that, ideally, should be the main inspiration or, at the very least, an important contributor to the formation of musical groups. But bands, just like regular friendships, often have a reduced shelf life. I’m sorry to get you depressed, but more groups break up every day than you care to imagine.
It’s not just fresh blood that is needed. It’s dreams and the enthusiasm with which some songwriters are able to narrate their own visions. If there is one element that pop music cannot do without, it is exuberance. If that wasn’t the case, music producers would finally get their way and have a computer’s AI write for their hundreds of hit songs on a daily basis. The formulas for successful tunes are well known, but the human touch is required to turn them into something truly special.
Maya Lucia’s sleepy baby club may appear to be just another indie-rock sound, but, in fact, it’s a tune with its own unique language. This isn’t achieved by using some exotic scale that had never been utilized in pop music. It’s also not because songwriting completely erases the rules of what is possible in pop music. No, Maya Lucia’s tune captures a completely unique and personal perspective. Besides, there’s also the matter of the great chorus and the distinctive vocal tone. The world needs more songs for which comparisons feel unfair. This is one of those!
Zzzahara – get out of la
Similar artists: girl in red, empress of, mitski, eyedress, chairlift, crumb, sales, remi wolf, girlpool
Genre: Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Alternative Rock
When I was a kid, grown-ups used to talk to us about the benefits of reading. They would tell us that, among the many great things that this activity could do for you, reading could help you travel to any part of the world and even farther than that. It didn’t do that by providing a free ticket to an exotic destination, I was saddened to learn. But, supposedly, what it would do instead is fire up your synapses and get you to think so deeply about the words you were looking at that you couldn’t avoid but believe you were in the place described by the book.
It’s likely that you were fed a similar story. It’s likely that you also got your heart broken. But, I am here to take the defense of the grown-ups. Perhaps, if we didn’t immediately receive the visions that we were promised, it wasn’t the fault of the system but of the writing itself. The same can be said of other art forms as well. Music, in particular, because of its expressive nature and, usually, its brevity, can be the magical ticket to a place you’ve never been to before. It takes, however, great artists to do this for their audiences.
Zzzahara’s get out of la presents the singer-songwriter as a soothsayer capable of invoking a world through sound. The geographical location checks out, but it is unclear, besides this, if the images that the singer is drawing up are real or imagined. How do you experience them? The only way of stepping inside this world is to simply let zzzahara work the indie-pop magic. Maybe close your eyes and draw a few deep breaths if you think it helps. You’ll get there, I tell you! Those grown-ups may have been right all along.
