Mia Joy – Star Echo Heavy Dove
Today, Mia Joy announces her long-awaited sophomore album, Star Echo Heavy Dove, out January 15th 2027 via Fire Talk, and presents its lead single/video, “Wings of Desire.”
Star Echo Heavy Dove closes a six-year orbital path; with it, Mia Joy returns — to form, to recording and releasing her quietly assured music — and is made all the better by her time away. Recorded across sessions spanning years and mined from compositions covering the totality of Joy’s career, Star Echo Heavy Dove is a self-referential ode to artistic and spiritual resilience. It engages an internal dialogue on change and growth, ending a chapter on the grounds of its genesis with an entirely new point of view. On Star Echo Heavy Dove, Mia Joy comes back to where she started — not only to see how far she’s come, but to explore where else she can go this time around.
Lead single “Wings of Desire” is an entrancing reflection on distance and longing, named after Wim Winders’ 1987 film of the same name. “Wings of Desire” functions as Star Echo Heavy Dove’s centerpiece, exploring its themes of desire, limerance, and what we lose or gain in the pursuit of romance. The accompanying “Wings of Desire” music video — a sweet and striking visual helmed by Jordan Nelson — nods to Joy’s appreciation of Wenders’ film, and collects lush footage of Joy with her friends and bandmates around their homebase of Chicago, Illinois.
Of “Wings of Desire,” Joy adds: “Seeing Wenders’ film for the first time helped me move internal static to words — one of those seminal moments in life where what you’re watching mirrors life so dearly my only way to resolve myself was to write this song. I’m gravitated to lonely characters, solitude, longing. One of Star Echo Heavy Dove’s motifs is centered around balancing the tug of war between feeling satisfaction with being self-sufficient and the willingness to give that up for the vulnerability of expanding desire. There’s a great message in there about living for all that life offers, letting yourself go even if you end up bleeding. “
The collaborative and full-band nature of Star Echo Heavy Dove contrasts heavily with that of Joy’s debut Spirit Tamer, a moving collection of tracks that were largely defined by Joy and her loop pedal alone. Look no further than “Circle,” Joy’s first album track to see her bring in an outside guest appearance: Midwife’s Madeline Johnston. “Like Author, Like Daughter saved my life. It was one of those moments where you hear something and you’re a fan for life,” Joy says of her introduction to Midwife, which began with the artists sharing the stage in 2018. In the late fall and early winter of 2024, Joy began exploring her own affinity for slower, nosier rock, and “it didn’t feel right not having Madeline on it,” Joy says. “I just said ‘please,’ and she said ‘duh,’ and we did it.” Anchored by Midwife’s signature guitar drones and entrancing vocals, the resulting “Circle” is a collaboration that feels long overdue, an extension of both artists’ work in crafting hypnotic melodies.
Mia Joy has maintained a crate-digging curiosity which anchors her music, and stems from adolescent hours spent borrowing CDs from the library, ripping them to her home computer and building a rolodex of references that continue to shape her art. “It’s a gorgeous socialist system,” Joy says of her library visits which led her to the works of Brian Eno, Neu, and Todd Rundgren among others. This curiosity has extended throughout Joy’s 20s, where she has found employment at record stores and spends her days combing through bins and finding hidden gems around every corner. These habits result in a vast and encyclopedic bed of musical influences which seep into Joy’s own music. Where Spirit Tamer was a Grouper-indebted dreampop foray propelled by a penchant for Arthur Russell, Star Echo Heavy Dove sees Joy tap into sophisti-pop sounds, breakbeat drums, and slyly Beatles-esque melodies. “I was thinking ‘Frozen’ by Madonna,” Joy reveals, “very sexy MILF, late 90s …very tranquil but also electronic and layered.”
A palette as vast as Joy’s requires a crew of collaborators to trust with the task of coalescing these often disparate references. To get the space, time, and comfort necessary for her to produce Star Echo Heavy Dove’s excavating songs, Mia Joy tapped her familiar cast of characters: Michael Macdonald (guitar/bass/organ/synth), Jack Berereton and Jordan Nelson (drums), Scott Rubin (viola), and Michael Santana (electric guitar). “We have this very intimate knowingness,” Joy says of these longstanding relationships: “We just telepathically know what we like from each other.” As the sessions carried on and planets continued circling their orbits, Mia Joy landed firmly on the ground.
Revelling in the empathy and wisdom that can only come with time, Joy admits that “life is still really hard, but it’s not the end of the world.” Star Echo Heavy Dove speaks to these aches and joys that come with progression, stagnancy, and the continued practice of honing one’s artistic vision. Even if we end up back at the beginning, Mia Joy and Star Echo Heavy Dove insist that our only option is to pick up the pieces and do it all again.
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