Maya Hawke’s lead single Missing Out is on her newest album release, titled Chaos Angel. The reflective album follows her sophomore album Moss, which contained her hit single Thérèse.
Words: Ruby Penson-Golding
Photos: Trevor Tweeten, Mom+Pop Records
Arriving 31 May via Mom+Pop records – a New York City based independent record label – Chaos Angel features collaborations with Benjamin Lazar Davis and Will Graefe, and is set to see the singer take listeners on a “deeply beautiful, meditative” journey, exploring the theme of falling in love, going through heartbreak and emerging stronger because of it.
The record contains ten songs, and follow the 25-year-old as she shows a more vulnerable yet mature side to her songwriting.
Hawke’s lead single and debut from the album is called Missing Out. In the song, the musician takes a look back at the semester she spent living near her brother’s college campus and partying with his classmates in an attempt to capture the formative college experience she never had.
“There was actually a girl who went to Brown, where my brother goes to college, and we were all going around saying what our wish was for ourselves,” she said, explaining how it was one moment during this time that inspired the song.
“She said, ‘I want to write the next great American novel’. It was the moment where I felt older than everyone because I laughed so hard. I was like, ‘You are so far down the wrong track! Wish to write a novel. That would be a miracle. Don’t wish to write the next great American novel, that’s a nightmare!’ It made me feel I actually am a different place in my life than these people I was around. It totally inspired this whole song.”
A description of the album reads that “at first glance, there are scenes just as sad as those on [previous LPs] ‘Blush’ and ‘Moss’”, but once you dig into each of the tracks, it becomes clear that, at its core, ‘Chaos Angel’ is an “altogether happier album” than its predecessors.
“Through these songs, Maya accepts the cycles we travel, the things we can leave behind and the things that will always be with us, before concluding: ‘The only thing to regret is the time I’ve spent regretting’. That’s what ‘Chaos Angel’ became in the end: a portrait of a person, complicated and still searching, but evolving,” it added.
Following the reception of her independently released A and B side singles in 2019, she released the deeply personal full-length album Blush. Hawke, who wrote the lyrics, continued her collaboration with Grammy Award-winning songwriter Jesse Harris, who wrote the music for the album.
Listen to Chaos Angel wherever you stream your music, or buy the album from Mom+Pop Records.