Mxmtoon is having a Sad Disco, are you in?
Photo credit: Lissyelle Laricchia
Tour Dates:
5/2 - Montreal, QC @ Fairmount
5/4 - Toronto, ON @ Danforth Music Hall
5/5 - Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
5/7 - Chicago, IL @ House of Blues *SOLD OUT*
5/8 - Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theater
5/10 - Englewood, CO @ The Gothic
5/11 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Complex
5/13 - Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
5/14 - Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom
5/15 - Seattle, WA @ Showbox Market
5/17 - San Francisco, CA @ Regency *SOLD OUT*
5/18 - San Francisco, CA @ Regency
5/20 - Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory *SOLD OUT*
5/21 - Los Angeles, CA @ Fonda *SOLD OUT*
5/22 - Los Angeles, CA @ Fonda
5/24 - San Diego, CA @ House of Blues
5/25 - Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
5/27 - Dallas, TX @ The Studio at The Factory
5/28 - Austin, TX @ Scoot Inn (Outdoors)
5/29 - Houston, TX @ White Oak Downstairs
5/31 - Orlando, FL @ Beacham
6/1 - Atlanta, GA @ The Loft
6/3 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club *SOLD OUT*
6/4 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Rozian Theatre
6/5 - Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts *SOLD OUT*
6/7 - New York, NY @ Webster Hall *SOLD OUT*
6/8 - New York, NY @ Webster Hall
6/10 - Boston, MA @ Royale *SOLD OUT*
6/11 - Boston, MA @ Royale
The world first met Maia, the mastermind behind mxmtoon, when she was a 17-year-old singer with a ukulele. In 2017, and from the guest bedroom in her parents’ Oakland home, the high-school student began posting covers of pop favorites and her own catchy confessional musings, tunes that spoke frankly of her setting’s assorted tribulations — dates and a lack thereof, online socializing and offline loneliness. A queer kid of mixed Chinese, German, and Scottish ancestry, Maia sang songs that expressed an interiority of the underrepresented with honesty, understanding, and hooks that could not be forgotten. mxmtoon became a streaming sensation, her teenage ditties defining a new era of what it meant to make bedroom pop. mxmtoon became an avatar for the new bloom of representation and inclusion in American pop.
Today, mxmtoon returns with her new album rising, which will be released on May 20th on AWAL. The album will be supported by a US tour with more dates already added in many major cities due to demand. The now Brooklyn-based artist is also releasing a new song “sad disco” which is out today. “sad disco,” is an electrifying dance party for one inspired by the stacks of ABBA records that comforted her during her year of lost time. Backed by fluorescent synthesizers and tessellated drums, Maia offers a sharp scene of a teenager stranded at home, finding comfort in moving and singing along when “you’re bored and alone.” It’s a three-minute revelation for mxmtoon, not only for the depth of its storytelling but also for its unapologetic disco indulgence, a longtime love of Maia that she’s never brought to bear with such power. “sad disco” is music as a rescue mission.
On “sad disco” mom toon tells us “I was 17 years old when I wrote my song “prom dress.” four years later, I sat and listened to it, wondering if the lyrics and ideas still resonated with my now 21-year-old self. i decided that it did, and it also didn’t. I’d grown up since I wrote that song and realized I wanted to make something that felt current to my individual. “sad disco” was the resolution to that desire. a song built with the same bones that “prom dress” was made from, but more reflective of the growth I’ve experienced in my own life since. it’s a song meant to make you find joy in the quiet, to emulate that feeling of being alone in your bedroom, blasting music through a pair of headphones in the middle of the night. in a way, it feels like an answer to the girl who wrote “prom dress” in the first place. serving as a reminder that she isn’t stuck on the floor with tears streaming down her face forever, but that she’ll grow up, and the loneliness she sometimes feels won’t define her. she can still choose to dance and have her own “sad disco.”
Last month mxmtoon gave us “mona lisa,” a dreamy, ukulele-driven ditty. Both songs hail a new direction for the already accomplished singer-songwriter.
More on rising….
In truth, only five years have passed since Maia’s self-made songs and videos began shaping a new sort of star through mxmtoon. But at least two of those years have, of course, passed like decades, each packed with enough worry and woe and loss and hope to catalyze aging at large. And so it goes with rising, mxmtoon’s bold and compelling and wise second album, a 12-song set that looks at the hardest lessons of these recent dark days and opts to surge forward through triumphs of pop-and-disco confessionalism. Though wrought as always from personal experience, mxmtoon extends these glittering and moody tunes — the impatiently waiting jangle of “mona lisa,” the frustrated but persevering electrofunk of “scales,” the incandescent and unforgettable bounce of “dance (end of the world)” — as acts of communal solidarity. Maia knows this has all been hard, so she wants to sing it out, together.
In late 2019, Maia had just finished her first full tour as mxmtoon, and she felt inspired by the prospects of her career and life to come — two new EPs in the making, more shows, a planned move to join her brother in New York. But as the pandemic took hold, she returned to her parents’ home, working to return to her old writing habits in that guest bedroom-turned-makeshift studio. She felt stuck, however, so suspended in time and place she barely wrote anything at all during 2020. What’s more, she lost a cherished grandfather to leukemia, rushing to see him one last time in Florida, and then a beloved grandmother. That’s to say nothing of elections and protests, nationalist revanchism and bigoted violence, enough to beleaguer or age anyone.
Much of rising unfurls from that same premise — mxmtoon’s hallmarked vulnerability buttressed by a newfound musical effervescence and might. These are the songs, as Maia puts it, that she wished existed when she struggled as a teen. They are instruction manuals for surviving, written for young people looking for themselves, but coded as magnetic pop. “growing pains” asks thorny questions about whether we actually improve as we age (or if that’s just what we tell ourselves to feel better) above guitars that shimmer like a sunrise and drums that lift off like rockets. “dance (end of the world)” acknowledges the apocalyptic tenor of our times but finds at least 150 seconds of Gloria Gaynor-style salvation in holding someone (yourself included) close and just moving. “learning to love you” reckons with the exhausting demands of our breathless interconnectedness and funnels the dizziness into a pop sunshower, its namesake chorus rendered as a gleeful collective credo. “Frown” gets absolutely funky with absolute existential despair, a pressure-relief valve for the beset mind.
Everything here doesn’t revel in musical refulgence, though. As Maia relates the story of visiting her dying grandfather during “florida,” she remains under cover of chiming acoustic guitars and cascading cymbal washes, a choice that highlights the writing’s poignant intimacy. Laced with arcing strings and textural harmonies, the exquisite “dizzy” captures the vertigo of someone who has spent four years in the public eye but, more broadly, anyone who thinks too much about the perception of online strangers. These more mellow moments betray the depth of their peppy counterparts and the breadth of experience that Maia, now 21, frontloads into mxmtoon.
For Maia, rising represents the culmination of an unintended trilogy that also includes dawn and dusk, the dual EPs she released in 2020. It’s true that Rising continues their era of rapid musical growth for mxmtoon. But these dozen songs are the definitive steps forward for mxmtoon, because they are just as ingenious and honest and unguarded musically as Maia has always been lyrical.
This is the music she needed to make and hear after those years that felt like decades, after growing enough to know this is what other people might need, too. These songs collectively argue that growth is never done, that rising is just one of many restarts and beginnings to come. “The old me was OK,” she declares at the start of “coming of age,” the wonderland that closes rising. “But I think it’s time for something new.” From the sound of it all, she delights in being reborn.
