Maria BC Hyaline Vinyl LP Indies 2022

1. No Reason
2. April
3. The Only Thing
4. ROF
5. Keepsakes
6. Rerun
7. ***
8. Betelgeuse
9. The Big Train
10. Good Before
11. Hyaline

Following last year’s debut EP, ‘Devil’s Rain’, which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria recorded ‘Hyaline’ across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces. Their classically trained mezzo- soprano voice soars over raw, ethereal guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park – now almost unrecognizable – settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies.

Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens ‘Hyaline’ to a ‘sonic collage’. It’s a project of patience and trusting the process.

‘Hyaline’, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, songwriting is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it.

A knife’s-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, ‘Hyaline’ accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of spectres: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.