Marci – Mask Lady and Late Night Girl
Marci—the project of Marta Cikojevic—returns with the announcement of her new album, Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, out August 28th via Arbutus Records, and in conjunction, shares its lead single, “Butterfly Sticker.”
When we last heard from Marci, she was inviting us to dance the pain away under the glittery lights of a disco ball on 2022’s Marci. A longtime member of the Montreal group TOPS, Marci established Cikojevic as a solo artist with an intuitive understanding of pop music as a vehicle for emotional catharsis on and off the dancefloor. Four years later, Cikojevic returns with Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, another record of euphoric pop with a heart of gold, but now there’s a tinge of melancholy accompanying ebullience, a nostalgic glow around the glitter. These are party girl anthems for when the party is over, delivered with love and compassion for the good times and great memories.
Since recording Marci, Cikojevic moved from Montreal to Los Angeles and the album title is inspired by an only-in-LA interaction Cikojevic had with an impeccably dressed woman she would see walking around her Hollywood neighborhood, always in a mask that covered her entire face. One evening, on the way home from a night out, Cikojevic mustered up the courage to speak to the mysterious woman. “Omg you’re Mask Lady! You’re so iconic, I think you’re amazing,” Cikojevic remembers saying. “And she replied, ‘Oh hey, you’re ‘Late Night Girl,’ because she would see me at night outside having a cigarette or coming home from a party.”
For Cikojevic, the unlikely connection between a party girl and a masked woman encapsulated the vibe she was going for with the second Marci record. “It kind of worked out perfectly because I think a lot of the songs [on this album] are really dealing with duality,” she says. “Late Night Girl is out partying and having a good time—you know, the sun’s never gonna rise, we’re never gonna die. And Masked Lady is the one keeping all of those feelings inside.”
For Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, Cikojevic once again collaborated with TOPS bandmate David Carriere to elevate the sound she so confidently established on Marci. A defining aspect of a Marci song is the ability to instantly conjure up past hits while remaining fresh, a tribute to Cikojevic and Carriere’s deep knowledge of pop music and playful approach to song construction. Today’s single, the bittersweet “Butterfly Sticker” pulses with a melodic rhythm reminiscent of the breathlessly quick singing-style found in 90s classics like Savage Garden’s “I Want You,” contrasted with sparkly production sourced from the digitized sound of early 2000s pop as Cikojevic muses nostalgically about “a butterfly sticker where my heart used to be.”
For Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, Cikojevic wanted to try “things we didn’t get to do on [Marci] with singing styles or production, and songwriting that had more rock and roll and glam influences.” So, along with the array of vintage synths that gave Marci a warmly futuristic aesthetic, Mask Lady boasts a broader instrumental palette and elements drawn from both the Y2k-era messy pop girlies like Uffie and Kesha and Cikojevic’s love of 80s power balladeers like White Snake and Def Leppard.
With its careful balance of bittersweet and breezy sentiments, Mask Lady and Late Night Girl is a record that holds up a mirror to the dualities that define and soundtrack our lives: rock and pop, past and future, happiness and sadness, the inner and outer worlds. For Cikojevic, the heart of Mask Lady and Late Night Girl is the idea that we all have a masked woman and late night girl inside—sometimes we live as if the sun will never rise, sometimes we hide our true face from the world. The true self is somewhere between the two. “It’s anybody and nobody,” she says. “It’s you”.
#marciii