MAYA HAWKE - Moss

The face of Maya Hawke is becoming familiar to many people, especially in America. Whether she's lending her image to advertise well-known brands, fighting monsters in her acting ventures, or taking an active part in the fight for civil rights, Uma Thurman's daughter is building a promising career as an artist.

Maya's ambition now is to win over the public with her voice as well. The thirteen tracks that make up her second work, "Moss", seem purpose-built to bring out the delicate charm of her distinctive way of singing. Compared to her debut album, she chooses to set aside the rock swagger and soul forays in favour of a sober, minimal style. The result is an intimate, comforting work of pop folk.

Undoubtedly, one major source of inspiration during the writing process was Taylor Swift's “Folklore”, of which Hawke has always declared herself an admirer. It's no coincidence that she chose to record her new album at the very same studios that saw the genesis of her colleague's successful work. What's more, among the credits is Jonathan Low, who won a Grammy Award for his sound engineering work on that record. From this standpoint, the tracks on Moss reveal a number of shared musical threads: the intimate approach, the clean, limpid sound, and the minimalist musical setup (often reduced to just voice, guitar and piano).

On “Therese”, the single that preceded the album's release, the sound turns at times harsh and tormented, at times ethereal and undefined. The different sonic layers seem to partly evoke the ambiguous, jagged allure of Phoebe Bridgers's “Punisher”. In the video, inspired by the work of renowned photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki, multitudes of bodies entangle themselves within the depths of a forest. A scratchy electric guitar bursts into the darkness alongside the obsessive repetition of the line “It's just Thérèse”, a reference to the Balthus painting that a popular petition sought to have removed from New York's Metropolitan Museum for being deemed obscene.

Hawke doesn't always manage to sustain the same intensity throughout the album. Airy and sunny as they may be, the tunes on some songs like “Backup Plan”, “Bloomed Into The Blue” or “Sticky Little Words” are let down by rather clumsy lyrics. On this front, she comes across as more convincing on “Sweet Tooth”, where she refrains from over-explaining herself and lets the listener focus on the catchy chorus.

Sonically, “Moss” comes across as coherent and compact, but the reliance on certain recurring sonic structures lends a certain stasis to the work as a whole, and listening to the whole album in one sitting can prove tedious. Still, the overall arrangement is sumptuous and Hawke's voice is adorable. When she decides to pick up the pace on “South Elroy”, with its bursts of electric guitar and delightful piano melody, one can only hope her acting career won't pull her too far away from the deeply personal path she's carving out in the world of music.

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24/10/2022