In the first moments of Maiya Blaney’s new album A Room With a Door That Closes, a shivering, sped-up vocal sample threatens to fold in on itself entirely. “You’re my world/And I’m living for you,” it confesses in an unsettling tone, like a demented radio transmission from some distant past. Then the New York-based singer-songwriter collapses the song into clattering breakbeats, sending it into a chaotic, uninhibited groove. Blaney continually pulls off this move on her serpentine, exceptional second album: combining discordant sounds into a tense emulsion until the mixture suddenly ruptures. A mood piece focusing on self-worth in love and life, it reveals Blaney as a perceptive, forward-thinking songwriter, impelling folk, electronic, and alt-rock through hairpin turns.
A Room With a Door That Closes finds Blaney changing direction. The earthy neo-soul and silky smooth production of her 2021 debut, 3, linger in a few of her new album’s more languorous moments. But A Room With a Door That Closes also draws from the same mercurial, scuffed sounds as artists like Tirzah or Yves Tumor; here, Blaney casts a flickering light over a dark night of the soul, lifting every jagged rock along the way to see what’s lurking beneath each turbulent emotion. “There are days I’m not alright/Is that okay with you?” she admits on “Could You,” voice dripping with melancholy over a gently rippling guitar. One of several of the album’s quietly crushing ballads, it comes freighted with emotional weight: “I’ll try to make it better,” she assures during the song’s bridge, a promise that grows more insistent and more disillusioned with each climbing octave. On “Honey I,” Blaney conveys a similarly acute sense of loneliness across a delicately curving vocal melody, breakbeats, and electric guitar. It’s a stunning moment of clarity amid the album’s whirling storm.
Blaney has an all-consuming voice, whether dipped down to an intimate, close-mic’d whisper or blown out into an emphatic howl. Over a waterlogged piano on “Left,” she sounds despondent, slowly building toward the song’s crescendo of squealing electric guitar solos that could have been pulled out of a forgotten ’80s glam-rock gem. “Carmen Electra” is the album’s brashest track, whose nervy grunge-rock sound captures a potent sense of angst. “I don’t relate to fucking them anyway/I don’t relate to, ‘I was just lonely,’” she screeches over blown-out feedback and thrashing drums, giving voice to anger as easily as the sadness she explicated earlier. “Fumbled,” meanwhile, invokes X-Ray Spex at their most electric. The song’s perfectly bratty chorus (“They fumbled the bag!”), shouted over a revving synth, quickly turns into a jittery schoolyard taunt you can’t help repeating right along with her.
Blaney’s small but meaningful production choices gild the edges of her music in darkened, oxidized colors. The watery cello that circles her voice during “And,” the squall of feedback that rips open “‘Affirmatively’ (Part II),” or the frenetic, synth-heavy outro on the atmospheric “IDR” give movement and cohesion to the album, uniting its disparate threads with a deft touch. On “Recognize Me” a full band backs her for a wobbly indie-rock track about wanting to reboot your life. “When spring hits/You won’t even recognize me,” she sings as the arrangement quickly morphs toward its rafters-reaching bridge: “Don’t want you to recognize me/Not after all this healing.” Like the best moments on A Room With a Door That Closes, the admission leaves you woozily off-balance. But in Blaney’s capable hands, there’s softness to the blow.
