wowhd.co.uk

It's easy to suppress discomfort, but Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Maiya Blaney dives right in. She calls her new album, A Room With A Door That Closes, "a love letter to her blue," an emotional state that she defines as "a kinetic, intense, and dark energy that needs to be expressed as soon as it is felt." The songs on the album span radioactive kiss offs, sorrowful meditations on yearning, and gossamer reveries about self image. The music has a fittingly tumultuous, intricate sound: 1960s soul samples melt into warm drum n bass percussion, blips of glitch ping pong against grating synth, and Blaney's vocals range from searing punk exclamations to gentle, exploratory croons. It's the sound of a singer peering deeply within herself and presenting the world with everything she finds, unadulterated, in real time.

Blaney wrote the album while she was moving around a lot. She was craving alone time in order to process her feelings at the time. When she couldn't get the space she desired, her music became a necessary outlet. She wrote songs as soon as she started feeling intense emotions, and tapped into a sense of outsized teenage angst, which she describes as, "an impression there's no way that anyone else has ever felt what I'm feeling right now, and that I'm feeling the most than anybody else in the world." She adds that, "in processing that angst, you're sort of naive, but in the back of your head you're also aware of it." These songs take their time, luxuriating in the sound of a single word or the sound of finger against guitar string. They make room for Blaney's aspirations to bloom.