Alternative

Kscope · 25 September 2026

Maiah Wynne wrote “See the Water” (3:00) at sixteen, when she got her first dulcimer, and it is the track that explains best how the album works: a sliding guitar with a blues edge, a lyric about her own inner critic and three minutes flat to say it in.

Twelve tracks and 44:28. She wrote and produced them, and most of the takes were done on a laptop while she was touring, in hotel rooms, between a move to the other side of the world and a return to study. She plays over a dozen instruments on it. Justin Abel handles the mix and additional production and Alan Douches the master, and the result never gives away where it came from: “Satellites” (3:31) is a lullaby with violin and “In a Dream” (4:03) brings in cello, bass and percussion without anything sounding squeezed.

Alex Lifeson plays guitar on “Another Step” (3:58), which also has Dan Avidan singing, and on “Don’t Wait” (4:42). Wynne is the singer in Envy of None, the band she shares with him, Andy Curran and Alfio Annibalini, and before that she had put out the two Lucy Gray Baird song collections (2020 and 2022) and “Out of the Dark” (November 2024), her first full-length on her own. There are more hands here: cellist Bethany Joyce, violinist Avelyn Reynolds, guitarist Brooks Berg, drummers Adam Brzycki and Randy Cooke and Henry Sheppard on flugelhorn.

The sequencing is the weak point. No track gets past 4:48 and seven sit under four minutes, so the album moves in short jolts; “Underwater” (2:40) and “Don’t Wait” turn towards electronics and break the acoustic palette the other ten had been building, and “Breathe” (2:38), already out as a single in May, stops before it has said what it set out to say. It loses the thread at track eight and comes back at twelve.

“Girl Dinner” (4:03) closes the album on recordings of audiences singing it, taken from the tour. She launches the record on 14 October at Piano Smithfield in London.

Rating: 7.6/10

Text by Marçal Bonastre