Maz
On Loveandpain, the new EP from Maz, moniker of rising indie pop singer Marley Guevara, the tensions between the past, present, intimacy and desire are deeply personal. After spending her early years pulling inspiration from the 00s and 10s artists she grew up on and filtering them through a modern pop perspective, Guevara found an unexpected creative collaborator in a relative whose creative presence came to her from deep within her family tree.
While writing her new EP, Guevara found long-forgotten tapes of her great-grandfather singing and playing guitar. Listening to the recordings of him singing Pedro Infante and “Bouquet of Roses” by Eddy Arnold, along with recordings of him singing karaoke, she found herself feeling newly inspired. “I started asking him, in my own way, if he wanted to make a project with me,” she says, “it became one of the most meaningful creative experiences I’ve ever had. It felt like I wasn’t just making music inspired by my great-grandfather; I was making it with him.”
She kept the tapes and a photo of him nearby while writing and found herself sampling his guitar parts and working those sounds as layers into her compositions. The resulting lead single and title track, “Loveandpain,” is dreamy and spacious, tinged with frothy pop effervescence and low-key drums, all with Maz's hypnotic vocals front and center. In many ways, the rest of the EP was informed by this experience too. On Loveandpain, Guevara is in deep conversation with the past, with patriarchy, religious expectation, and the ways in which modern life also separates us from our truest nature and each other through technology. Recorded across San Francisco, LA, New York and Montreal, Maz’s sound is fresh, cool and cosmopolitan–a far cry from what one might expect coming out of the mountain town where she grew up in Utah.
Exploring the push and pull between intimacy and distance, both in her lyrical subjects and in the way she presents her project to the public, Guevara is carving her own path in a time of overexposure and unearned intimacy. Approaching this conflict head-on, the angular, electronica-tinged track “Bullshit” addresses that frustration of modern living and the divisions in our culture “It’s about screaming your thoughts into the void,” says Guevara, “ writing a thousand letters, trying to speak up and trying to make sense of it all while feeling increasingly helpless.” It’s something she addresses on the moody, whisper-quiet “Radiosilence,” where she laments on the ways in which technology so often drives us apart.
EP opener “Coffee” is steeped in more of Maz’s indietronica sheen, where fuzzy synths and a bouncy back beat are the palette Guevara uses to deliver her cool and confident reflections on faith, womanhood, and the complicated expectations of the Mormon religion she grew up around. On “Choke,” Guevara explores helplessness and frustration around how patriarchy complicates our most intimate relationships, “I imagined myself as a kind of guardian angel watching these patriarchal dynamics play out in a home,” she says, “feeling the frustration of seeing a woman give so much of herself to someone who gives her nothing back.”
Across Loveandpain, Guevara searches for connection in a world that often seems determined to make it difficult to find. By bringing her great-grandfather’s voice into conversation with her own singular perspective, Maz offers something that feels both personal and universally relatable: a project about what we inherit, what we desire, and what (and who) we choose to bring forward with us, packaged in her unique alchemy of pop.
PRESS
flood: maz Breaks Down Each of the Very-Playable Tracks on Her Debut EP ‘NPC’
“Without simplifying the emotions embedded in her lyrics, Maz manages to make them easily palatable for the minimalist synthpop aesthetic she maintains across the release’s all-too-brief 12 minutes.”
PASTE: Exclusive - Maz Announces Debut EP with Lead Single “Kiss Kiss Boom”
“‘Kiss Kiss Boom’ is Kate Bush turned brat—an emotionally pointed ode to the 80’s with a modern indie pop spin.”
CONSEQUENCE: STAFF PICKS - BEST SONGS (“CIRCLE”)
“Springy yet delicate in its execution, the care with which this composition was put together points to a promising career ahead for the singer-songwriter"
STEREOGUM: NEW MUSIC REVIEW
“Infectious indie earworms”
FADER: SONGS YOU NEED IN YOUR LIFE (“KISS KISS BOOM”)
“Indie pop artist Maz introduces herself with a soft bang on ‘Kiss Kiss Boom.’”
ONES TO WATCH: Electro-Pop's Latest Cool-Girl Maz Will Intoxicate You on "Kiss Kiss Boom"
“Instantly captivating.”
