29 March 2022 - 0 Comments

Today, one of the brightest and most engaging voices of her generation mxmtoon returns with her new album Rising, which will be released on May 20th on AWAL. In very exciting news, the album will be supported by her first ever New Zealand show at The Tuning Fork for all ages. For show and ticket information, click here. Presale will be available from Thursday 31 March 11am local and tickets go on sale to general public at Friday 1 April 11am local.

The now Brooklyn-based artist also shares new song Sad Disco - an electrifying dance party for one inspired by the stacks of ABBA records that comforted her during her year of lost time. Backed by fluorescent synthesizers and tessellated drums, Maia offers a sharp scene of a teenager stranded at home, finding comfort in moving and singing along when “you’re bored and alone.” It’s a three-minute revelation for mxmtoon, not only for the depth of its storytelling but also for its unapologetic disco indulgence, a longtime love of Maia that she’s never brought to bear with such power. Sad Disco is music as a rescue mission.

On Sad Disco mxmtoon tells us “I was 17 years old when I wrote my song Prom Dress. Four years later, I sat and listened to it, wondering if the lyrics and ideas still resonated with my now 21-year-old self. I decided that it did, and it also didn’t. I’d grown up since i wrote that song and realized I wanted to make something that felt current to my individual. Sad Disco was the resolution to that desire. A song built with the same bones that Prom Dress was made from, but more reflective of the growth I've experienced in my own life since. It’s a song meant to make you find joy in the quiet, to emulate that feeling of being alone in your bedroom, blasting music through a pair of headphones in the middle of the night. In a way, it feels like an answer to the girl who wrote Prom Dress in the first place. Serving as a reminder that she isn’t stuck on the floor with tears streaming down her face forever, but that she’ll grow up, and the loneliness she sometimes feels won’t define her. She can still choose to dance and have her own Sad Disco."

Last month mxmtoon gave us Mona Lisa, a dreamy, ukulele driven ditty which will feature on rising. Both songs hail a new direction for the already accomplished singer-songwriter.

In truth, only five years have passed since Maia’s self-made songs and videos began shaping a new sort of star through mxmtoon. But at least two of those years have, of course, passed like decades, each packed with enough worry and woe and loss and hope to catalyze aging at large. And so it goes with rising, mxmtoon’s bold and compelling and wise second album, a 12- song set that looks at the hardest lessons of these recent dark days and opts to surge forward through triumphs of pop-and-disco confessionalism.

For Maia, rising represents the culmination of an unintended trilogy that also includes dawn and dusk, the dual EPs she released in 2020. It’s true that rising continues their era of rapid musical growth for mxmtoon. But these dozen songs on the album are the definitive steps forward for mxmtoon, because they are just as ingenious and honest and unguarded musically as Maia has always been lyrically.

This is the music she needed to make and hear after those years that felt like decades, after growing enough to know this is what other people might need, too. These songs collectively argue that growth is never done, that rising is just one of many restarts and beginnings to come. “The old me was OK,” she declares at the start of ‘coming of age,’ the wonderland that closes rising. “But I think it’s time for something new.” From the sound of it all, she delights in being reborn.

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