‘Hyaline’ is the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CAbased artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Following last year’s debut EP, ‘Devil’s Rain’, which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria recorded ‘Hyaline’ across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces. Their classically trained mezzosoprano voice soars over raw, ethereal guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park - now almost unrecognizable - settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies.
Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens ‘Hyaline’ to a ‘sonic collage’. It’s a project of patience and trusting the process.
‘Hyaline’, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, songwriting is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it.
A knife's-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, ‘Hyaline’ accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of spectres: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.
TRACK LISTING
No Reason
April
The Only Thing
ROF
Keepsakes
Rerun
***
Betelgeuse
The Big Train
Good Before
Hyaline
