Nestled in gloomy corners of the internet are forums dedicated to liminal spaces, which are eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling: a shopping centre after closing hours; a vacant and seemingly endless corridor; an abandoned office building still illuminated by fluorescent LEDs. Find yourself in deep enough of a Wiki-hole and you’ll conjure a feeling you thought perhaps lost with childhood – gazing at something apparently normal with a profound sense of wonder and dread.
It’s these dreamlike states that became the unlikely muse and namesake for mxmtoon’s third album, ‘Liminal Space’. “They’re evoking nostalgia and dealing with the uncomfortable feelings that accompany these almost familiar things,” she says, specifically of The Backrooms – a ‘subgenre’ of liminal space that features fictional locations only accessible by exiting reality. “It feels like you’ve been there before, but also maybe you haven’t,” adds the 24-year-old artist also known as Maia. “A lot of the feelings that I was talking about in the record felt so tied to this sense of trying to go back, but also being afraid to. Wanting to move forward, but feeling so attached to your past.”
Maia began uploading her GarageBand-crafted music to YouTube and Soundcloud in 2017 and quickly garnered a cult following for her relatable musings on the anxieties of teenage hood. She self-released her debut LP ‘The Masquerade’ in 2019, and, amid the depths of the pandemic, found TikTok virality through the album track ‘prom dress’ – a diary entry-esque pop song about watching your youth slip away in the rearview mirror. Three years later, she released her follow-up record, the disco-imbued ‘rising’, marking a departure from her bedroom-pop origins and a reluctant first step into the adult world.
“Things are a lot more cyclical than we probably realise”
Though ‘Liminal Space’ at times dwells on the unrelenting pull of nostalgia, Maia’s life in the lead-up to its release has found her firmly and irreversibly pulled into a new future. When she meets NME in London, she’s only days post a cross-country move from New York City to Nashville, Tennessee. “I’ve slept in my own bed two nights this month. I’m hanging on by a thread,” she says with a grin and a shuffle of her cowboy boots – the one telltale sign of her new address.
It’s a major move, but one she’s been contemplating for a while. On ‘I Hate Texas’ – ‘Liminal Space’’s first single and, notably, her first country song – she sings: “I’m wanting change so bad that I’ll go Southern/Find another brand-new beginning.”
‘Rain’ finds her wandering the streets of New York and pre-emptively mourning her time there, knowing she would have to leave. Elsewhere, on album opener ‘Dramatic Escape’ she asserts her aversion to a “gradual change” because she is craving something more drastic in its place. When Maia began writing the record, she thought this would inevitably lead her back to her home state of California. Then, halfway through, something changed. “I wasn’t ready to move back,” she explains. “And I realised I needed to express that to my family.”
Familial bonds and their complications, then, took centre stage on the record – themes she had already wanted to explore after two of her grandparents died. But the need to truly delve into these relationships deepened when, early into production, she learnt that her mum had been diagnosed with cancer. “I remember just thinking, now it makes even more sense for me to do this, and dissect the complicated feelings that come up when you’re thinking about grief, and sometimes grieving things that aren’t even gone yet,” she says.
The result is a record that chronicles the most turbulent period of her life so far. Through its 12 tracks, she outlines the earth-shattering reality of having a sick parent. Her candid musings trace the guilt of not wanting to abandon the life you’ve only just started to build for yourself and the shock of finally seeing your lifelong guardian as a mortal, flawed human, just like you.
Part of this ability to be vulnerable came with her decision to work with only women, including recording engineer Laura Sisk (Lana Del Rey, Troye Sivan), who mixed the album, and Heba Kadry (Björk, Beach House), who mastered it. “A lot of the stories that I was telling needed to exist without me providing context to the person that I was writing them with,” she explains. “I’ve gone into sessions before where I’ve talked about how I sometimes struggle with finding a place in the music industry because of my gender, and I’ve had a producer respond with, ‘That’s interesting, why do you feel that way?’ And I’ve been like, ‘Why do I feel that way? That’s such a silly question.’”
“I can’t sustainably spend as much time as I used to on the internet and keep my sanity”
Perhaps it’s why girlhood – a topic heavily dissected on the internet in recent years – plays such a prominent role on the record. TikTok may be focused on the consumptive trappings of girlhood – a face mask, a meal or a frivolous purchase – but through writing, Maia discovered that it’s something much less superficial: a string of shared experiences passed on from generation to generation like golden heirlooms and genetic quirks.
“I was really conscious of the fact that I was writing from my experience, but also writing from my mom’s experience and my grandma’s experience,” she says. Maia deconstructs this on ‘VHS’, a sombre indie-pop song about watching your innocence slip away, which heralds the cutting line: “It’s so bittersweet/I’ll be you one day.” “I think it’s easy for us to feel so entrenched in our own identities that we can forget about the people that came before us. Things are a lot more cyclical than we probably realise,” she adds.
When Maia’s music career began in 2017, via hushed ukelele covers recorded in her bedroom at night as a teenager, it was a secret from her family – one only revealed when her followers on YouTube began to eclipse the populations of some small cities. This record, though, has taught her to rethink her prior reluctance to open up. “It’s OK to talk about really vulnerable subjects with the people you love,” she says. “I really can’t overstate how important a lot of these songs were in starting conversations with my parents and my family, and, more specifically, with my mom. I remember my biggest fear was that they wouldn’t forgive me for having these really complicated feelings surrounding my relationships with them and myself.”
Yet it’s not only her family finding solace in ‘Liminal Space’. A long history on the internet (mxmtoon is a screen name from her earliest days online) means Maia has amassed an audience that has journeyed into adulthood by her side. Her first few releases ‘Falling for U’ and ‘Prom Queen’ tracked the anxieties of adolescence and now, her songs are providing a voice to the darkness that creeps in once it ends.
“I have leaned on my audience in a really real way over the last seven years,” she says. “When I graduated from high school, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m really scared to be out in the world’, because [I thought] I would lose the peer group that I was experiencing life alongside with. And I’ve been so lucky that my listeners have become that peer group for me.”
Yet, as she grows older, she admits that her relationship with the internet is shifting slightly. “I think I’m recognising that I can’t sustainably spend as much time as I used to on the internet and keep my sanity,” she says. “As I get older, I’m trying to make sure I balance my in-person interactions with being online. But it’s tricky. It’s this never-ending thing, and I’m still susceptible to doom-scrolling on my phone.”
Part of that means aligning the digital version of herself with the living, breathing human who is now setting up a home in Nashville. “I’m playing life offline,” she sings on the aforementioned ‘I Hate Texas’, and it turns out, it’s a real commitment. “The thing that I’ve struggled with the most in making music is bridging mxmtoon with who I am as a person,” she says. Then, she smiles. “This is the most Maia that a record has ever felt before.”
Mxmtoon’s ‘Liminal Space’ is out now
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