Back in 2018, Gia Margaret released her debut album, There’s Always Glimmer. Out via Orindal Records, the album established Margaret’s ability to chronicle the psychological depths beneath life’s surface, layers of feeling and emotion that sit behind every moment, colouring even the emptiest of rooms. “Margaret’s lyrics are devoid of melodrama,” we described in our review. “Often describing everyday events that at first glance might seem unremarkable, though her unique focus elevates them to something near transcendental, illuminating our lives from within and casting light on the sad magic of existence.”
The record’s rich sound relied on Margaret’s vocals, which acted as an even, compassionate guide through the lonely rooms. The solid force around which everything else could coalesce. But then came illness, and Gia Margaret lost the ability to sing. “This left me feeling like a shell of myself,” she explains, “so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort.” The result, Mia Gargaret, might not be the expected follow-up to There’s Always Glimmer, but the one required in the moment. “These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker,” Margaret says. “At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.”
The record brings Gia Margaret’s abilities as a musician and composer to the fore. Crafted mainly from synthesizer, piano and acoustic guitar, the songs also draw upon other sounds and textures, from church bells and lapping water to spoken word samples. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, the tracks retain a minimalist feel, the samples drifting through the often spare instrumentation like fleeting ghosts. The effect is one of remove, these elements of life presented translucent and secondhand, like memories projected onto a blank wall by a dying bulb.
The result is both eerie and moving. Like a sadness so sudden and immersive that it scarcely feels real. “Do you ever feel like you’re living your life / but you’re also barely there?” Margaret asks on ‘barely there’, encapsulating the record’s uncanny relationship with presence and absence. “I wanted to capture the feeling of a truly strange time in my life,” Margaret says, “even though I would prefer to forget it altogether.” At times There’s Always Glimmer felt like an out of body experience, floating high above the moment and achieving a new perspective. But Mia Gargaret is a dream departure not from the moment but from what has always been, and one that might never break. An experience not out of body, but out of life.
With this comes a change of tack. The need to be more proactive in optimism. More directly protective. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful,” Margaret says, “which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process. I was making music to self-soothe.” Take opener ‘apathy’, its warm currents overlaid with mournful piano, the spoken word sample of Margaret’s own vocal therapy playing as though from some speaker in the corner of the room. Sounding like hope abstracted, some artificial thing produced with the correct actions and conditions.
With words from the British philosopher Alan Watts, ‘body’ achieves a humming warmth, that half-panicked feel of hearing one’s suffering put into words. Of someone—some stranger— truly understanding, assuring you that you are not crazy at all. There’s comfort too in the languid tones of ‘no sleep no dream’, though it’s the transient kind that arrives only at the end of things, and tracks such as ‘sadballad’ and ‘3 movements’ offer a keener edge to the sorrow. The closing track ‘lesson’ ensures that the sense of sadness and turmoil remains. “Did I miss a lesson when I was younger / when I should have learned,” Margaret asks in the only real vocals on the album. “How to be a person / and how to believe in what I deserve?”
Of course, the music of Gia Margaret has always been melancholic, and the sound of this new record bears clear relation to what came before. “The palette of [There’s Always Glimmer] is built from shades of sadness,” we wrote of the previous record. “Loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within.”
It is in this second half that the difference emerges on the new album. Margaret has not thrown away the colours of her previous music, but paints according to a different end. If There’s Always a Glimmer was concerned with finding the persistent light within even the darkest of moments, then Mia Gargaret acknowledges the fragility of this spark. Because sometimes it is not a matter of perspective. There is no bright side to look upon. The work then becomes not finding the light but working to keep it alive, if only in memories, so that in some undecided future, it might burn bright once again.
Mia Gargaret is out now via Orindal Records (US) and Dalliance Recordings (rest of the world) and you can get it from the Gia Margaret Bandcamp page.
