MAITA – Want

Portland indie rock artist MAITA has announced the July 26 release of their new album want via Fluff & Gravy Records.

Led by Japanese-American singer-songwriter Maria Maita-Keppeler, the band’s third full-length release is their most crystallized work thus far. Along with the announcement, they share the debut single “girl at the bar,” a rumination on the desire to be an object of lust, set against the backdrop of a dive bar fever dream.

Maria Maita-Keppeler on the new single: “‘girl at the bar’ is a song that explores the way our memory of painful events can continue to resurface and shape our lives within a relationship. It explores the idea of trying to become the person that you imagine your partner desires at the cost of personal erasure, or in a way that compromises one’s own personhood. It’s the desire to shed the image of oneself formed with a long term relationship, to become something sexy or uncomplicated, to become a stranger to a partner in order to churn up some fire.”

Full of high highs and low lows, the new album finds Maita-Keppler coming out on the other side a little battered, but a lot closer to her initial goal: wanting without guilt.

 “This album feels like the most cohesive of any batch of songs that I’d written, because the slate was pretty blank in terms of what was going on around me,” she recalls. “Sometimes just being true to your own desires means not everyone is happy. If the album is about want, and it’s about desire, it’s also about being in a place where you’re like, ‘Yes, I am going to try to get what I want and do what I want. And I’m going to do it for me.’”

Recorded at Echo Echo in Portland, Oregon, want is a stark, arresting image of a place lost in time. With a woozy swirl of indie rock and melancholy, the album offers a razor’s edge look at a relationship in turmoil as it serves to strip away all that’s undesired in life.

#maitamusic