It’s a bit cheesy to mention that Maya Hawke is not only the proud daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman but also a star of Stranger Things as well as a key figure in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s Do Revenge. However, the genre of objective journalism obliges me to state some facts. Yes, you know, music criticism is journalism, too.
My point is that Hawke is a very talented artist who excels in both cinema and music. If an adept of the nepo babies narrative is reading this, please know that her third studio record is an excellent example of how that theory doesn’t always hold true. Devoted lovers of cabin-in-the-woods melodies have known this for four years because Hawke’s first two albums, Blush (2020) and Moss (2022), clearly illustrate how to create simple and charming folk music without any big claims. Now we see how her once-leisure activity is becoming in demand.
Knowing Maya Hawke’s heritage and her massive success in Stranger Things perfectly helps establish her reputation as a modest musician who does her thing without loud statements or big expectations. It’s safe to say that initially, she didn’t even bother to widely push her music career, simply doing what she liked. Among the millions of fans of her movie career, I bet only the true lovers of intimate and pleasantly boring acoustic ballads knew and understood what she was doing with a guitar.
By her third album, Hawke had so mastered her skills that it would be much harder for her not to be considered a significant figure among our time’s most talented young singer-songwriters. Firstly, she now has “Missing Out”, and it’s a banger alright, which will be equally interesting to play for both Kevin Bacon’s goats and a wider audience of Boygenius fans. Secondly, she knows how to conjure, literally out of nowhere, memetic lines like, “If you’re okay, then I’m okay” from “Okay”.
While Gracie Abrams, her movie industry peer, fellow summer LP releaser, and another hero of a series of nepo babies publications of New York Magazine, Vulture, and their colleagues, was adopting trendy Phoebe Bridgers-like sonics in her debut album, Good Riddance, Maya Hawke remained committed to the less danceable and bright sound of American music. Only with Chaos Angel did some distinct and more poppy details begin to emerge, and they are woven into folksy tunes so subtly that Taylor Swift will have a lot to think about when listening to it.
Speaking of Bridgers and Co., the first impression of Hawke’s new venture is how very Christian Lee Hutson it is. The simultaneously leisurely and piercing opener “Black Ice” sounds like a prequel or companion to one of his best songs, “Unforgivable”. “Is it so unforgivable / To wander off the course?” he sang there. “Why do it right when you can do it yourself? / And give up, give up, give up”, echoes Hawke here. I bet true admirers of both could find dozens of other intersections in their lyrics and sonics.
The second thought on this topic is: Oh, Hutson is on production duties here! Yet, Hawke knows perfectly how to dilute his approach’s seriousness and inescapable drama with meme hooks and teenage enthusiasm. “I don’t want to cry in your T-shirt ever again / Well, my anger was a compliment,” she sings in an epic, true folk MVPs-worthy verse in “Dark”. By rephrasing the iconic line “You want it darker”, we can confidently say that she knows how to make it brighter.
It’s evident that Maya Hawke is familiar with her father’s record collection and has extensive listening experience with iconic classics, which helps her music keep up the brand without slipping into the omnipresent indie folk with banjo, whispering vocals, and brass. At the same time, in “Better”, she goes even further than Beyoncé in merging pop with roots music, adding a bit of Auto-Tune and Travis Scott-ish Astroworld-y psychedelia. I dare say that she has even outdone many of her folk peers by blending this genre with meta- and self-irony.
Even fans of Stranger Things will find plenty of freakish and geeky stanzas here, like “Magic making my imagination real / I’ve forgotten how I feel” in “Wrong Again” or “Pink matter, dark matter / Glass shattered, corporate ladder / Cake batter, splatter paint” in “Dark.” Her wistful lyricism combines dorky stuff with sophisticated lines, fantastic stories with truths of life in such a wittily manner that some of it would look hilarious, even as memes on Reddit. Alongside fan service with mentions of “angels”, “satellites”, and “teleports”, she easily delivers clever observations as in “Wrong Again”: “I sit too close on purpose / To see if you adjust or hold your ground.”
“Hey, what’s the big idea?” she asks in “Big Idea”, answering herself: “All intelligence is artificial / We’re just making love on a ballistic missile.” Maya Hawke is one of the few musicians who wouldn’t mind admitting the eclectic nature of our erudition, and she also acknowledges this: “But I was born with my foot in the door”, she sings in “Missing Out”, hinting at the fact we began this review with. Well, if every prominent movie artist with a “foot in the door” could make such consistent records steeped in musical history, the pop industry would be much brighter.