Maya Hawke has released “Missing Out,” the first single from her upcoming album, Chaos Angel, to be released May 31st via Mom+Pop. Chaos Angel is the talented multi-hyphenate’s third album and follows the success of lauded sophomore full-length, Moss, which spawned a viral hit in the lead single “Thérèse”. With production helmed by Moss co-songwriter and collaborator Christian Lee Hutson, and featuring contributions by longstanding collaborators Benjamin Lazar Davis and Will Graefe, Chaos Angel is a deeply beautiful, meditative album about falling in love, fucking it up, and getting back up again.
Still only 25 years old, Maya has received global acclaim for her exquisite songwriting and witty, narrative lyricism. “Missing Out” is a wry yet poignant song derived from a semester Maya spent living near her brother’s college campus and partying with his classmates, a belated attempt at the formative college experience she never personally had. The track comes replete with a science-fiction influenced video directed by Alex Ross Perry.
Of the song’s storyline, Maya says, “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, 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.”
Chaos Angel takes the spare, viscerally honest songwriting Maya has made her name on and goes deeper, bolder. Both her most sonically sophisticated and thematically nuanced collection to date, it feels like a culmination. Across these 10 songs, Maya catalogs upheavals, revelations, foibles, and broken promises, all while navigating the patterns we repeat while growing older, wandering astray, and finding our way back to some core understanding of ourselves.
Maya imagined a figure raised to believe they were a god of love, only to move through the world and realize they were instead leaving wreckage and ruin in their wake. After descending into self-loathing, the chaos angel comes to a new conclusion. “On the journey home, she goes back through all the places she thought she destroyed,” Maya explains. “And in the rubble, wonder and beauty and magic grew.” It’s a parallel to Maya’s own experience across the album, snapshots leading to a new sense of self. The chaos angel watches over it all — a figure part guardian, part alter-ego, part imaginary friend.
Chaos Angel is also a document of Maya coming more fully into her own as a musician. Many of these tracks are still anchored by acoustic guitar and Maya’s graceful yet conversational vocals, but their surroundings are more intricate and lush than ever before.
At first glance, there are scenes just as sad as those on Blush and Moss, but Chaos Angel is an altogether happier album. 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.
Maya Hawke and her band will be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of the Tibet House Benefit Concert on February 26th alongside Joan Baez, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Maggie Rogers.