INTERVIEW: mxmtoon on her third album 'liminal space': "There was such a through line with all of these songs around my experiences in my life as they relate to gender."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 19 December 2024
mxmtoon has been releasing music since she was 17,. starting with a lo-fi, bedroom indie sound. In the intervening seven years her sound has evolved into multiple directions including disco, pop and country. With her songs regularly attracting streams in the tens of millions, she has become one of the most popular young independent musicians to break through in the 2020s.
In November she released her third studio album liminal space. It is her first album since 2022’s rising, and while that album saw mxmtoon bring her sound into an electronic-disco-pop space, on liminal space she explores what is almost the flip side, with a soundscape that is mellow, dialled back and intimate with elements of country. Lyrically the album is introspective and candid, which was also true of rising but where that collection dealt with the challenges of growing into young adulthood, liminal space looks at the aftermath - when growing pains transform into the stark realties of life, from familial relationships and broken love to struggling with mental health.
With such intimate and honest life stories forming the basis of the songs, mxmtoon wanted to create them in an environment where her experiences would be understood and took the oppountiy to create the album with an all-female team. This was applied not just to the music but extended to the entire creative process including the photographers and designers.
The album begins with ‘dramatic escape’ which starkly demonstrates this theme as mxmtoon acknowledges everything that needs to be done to recover from the general ordeals of life - ‘Wake up early and smell all the roses while you go with the flow’ - while also being unable, or unwilling, to make the changes needed: ‘I'm not looking for a gradual change / No thanks, I'll just keep planning my dramatic escape.' It is in many ways a dark message, wrapped up in a gentle, pared back sound.
The first single from the album ‘i hate texas’ is arguably the track that leans into a country sound the most on the album and looks at a romantic breakup so bad mxmtoon has moved interstate: ‘I'm turning every corner with exceeded caution / Hoping, praying, begging that you're not in Austin / I hate Texas, but the exits have more room to run away from you’. The gentle country sound and lyrical theme continues on the following track, ‘rain’ , with mxmtoon struggling with the concept of leaving home, finding out who you are in the process but only to have to return to your hometown before you are ready. “I said I'd go back home / But I don't really know where to go.”
‘VHS’ has a gentle electronic beat mixed with acoustic guitar and is a poignant look at growing older and mxmtoon’s relationship with her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer just as work commenced on liminal space. From considering how parents ‘lose’ children as they grow up through to the mourning we all go through as we age - ‘Wonder how I got so bitter / I usеd to be so sweet / Sometimes I rеally miss her / The kid I used to be.’ - it is perhaps the most personal song on the album.
‘passenger side’ is a perkier moment on the album, with a happier feel as mxmtoon comes out the other side of a bad relationship and rediscovers herself ‘Used to think your love would be the end / Then I went and found myself again.’ ‘god?’ and ‘now’s not the time’ return to a gentler, country infused sound and complex emotions of looking for purpose, and having to return home to support her mother through her cancer battle.
The album ends with ‘white out’ which has an intriguing soundscape that blends subtle elements of country, electronica and folk. With lush vocals and melodies in the chorus, it ends the album on a beautiful yet melancholic note as mxmtoon welcomes a sense of ‘whiteout’ to avoid the incessant demands of life. ‘my body's breaking down / And I'm ignoring my own soul…what's wrong with finding refuge
In the whiteout?’ Despite the sometimes bleak thoughts, there is ultimately a message of hope that the hard times will eventually resolve themselves ‘I'm not lost…Let's say I'm taking the long way home.’
liminal space is a superb album that further showcases mxmtoon as one of music’s greatest young singers. In a music scene where lyrically honesty and vulnerability has become the norm, mxmtoon’s own take on this is perhaps one of the most compelling thanks to the power she projects through the pureness, softness and gentleness of her delivery. liminal space feels like an important piece of the story of mxmtoon’s career that will develop in the coming years and we recently caught up with her to talk more about its career.
Hi Maia, it is so lovely to connect with you on this beautiful album. ‘VHS’ is my favourite, hands down. It's very raw, but it's very sweet. It's really, really, really beautiful, so congratulations on this song and the whole body of work that is liminal space.
Thank you. That's really kind. I'm excited to talk with you about it.
I don't even know where to start, but let's start with just the title. How do you feel it encapsulates the album as a whole?
Honestly, is the only title I could think of that was ever going to encapsulate the whole thing. For the longest time, we were just calling it ‘LP three' and even now I kind of have to rewire my brain to be like, ‘No, we actually settled on a name that kind of talks about the whole thing’.I just felt like liminality was a concept that I have been actively thinking about in terms of the visuals we were doing for the album, and how that was inspiring a lot of the storytelling of these very cyclical things that were happening in my life over the course of the last few years, and often times feeling kind of lost in the midst of them. I just felt like the only way to put a name to that area of my life was to call it ‘liminal space.’ It just felt like the perfect way to wrap it up in a bow and present it to the world was finding a word to describe how hard it was to wrap everything up in a bow and then present it to the world! So I'm really glad that we landed on it, and I'm grateful that a word exists that feels like it describes the whole thing.
Thematically, with this album, is it feels like this beautiful moment of absolute pause, but in the eye of the storm. How did you push yourself in this album, and where did the fears lie, or where did the joys lie in doing so?
I mean, I couldn't have described it better. I feel like that this album really did become the eye of the storm for me in a lot of ways, in the process of creating it. I realised very early on that the sessions that I was going to be writing in and working with the people that I was working with were oftentimes some of the calmest moments of my life at the time, and being able to really access those points and write music that was truly truthful for the first time, I think ever, and practicing more radical honesty inside of the things that I was making. I feel like in the past it has been harder for me because I've been so conscious of wondering what the impact of something I'm creating will have, not just on my life, but the people around me and my family members and the people I'm writing these songs about. There is obviously value in thinking about those things, and there's also something to be said for allowing yourself artistic freedom to explore the deeper and darker elements of the things that you're feeling at the moment that you're feeling them. There were both hard moments and really joyful moments in my writing sessions where I could sit with something that I was actively going through, but also give myself the space to talk about them with a judgment free zone. Making something that really felt actively tuned in to try to be as honest as possible in every step of the way. It's kind of this double edged sword, the hardest moments of working on the album were also maybe the most fun ones too, getting used to that process of really putting it all out on the table and trying to leave it there.
It must be very cathartic for you to be singing those songs. Your songs are definitely cathartic for us as listeners, but i must just be incredibly so for yourself as the creator.
Yeah, 100%. Music is something that can be an incredible place for relief and release and I'm so privileged to be able to have access to doing writing sessions where I can talk about the things that are going on in my life, and spend a day making a song about that. That is the greatest privilege ever. And I’m so lucky too to have had time in my life where I can make art and spend time with it for myself before I spend time with it in front of everybody else. It was really important to me on this record to have that separation of like church and state a little bit. One thing I was very conscious of before putting this album out was having a full album before making plans for a tour or a release day or anything like that. Nowadays, it can be such a sprint to get to this finish line of releasing an album that sometimes people are still working on an album while also talking about the release date, and that can work for some people, but that can also be really hard. I knew that this time around it was not something I wanted to do. I wanted to have time with these songs, not just for myself, but to show them to my parents, if the songs were about my parents, and to show them to my friends if I felt they were important to share with them. Having that time was really precious.
That's gorgeous. I love that you actively sought an entire squad of women on this project, which of course we’re all about that at Women In Pop. Can you tell me why you specifically went after that?
You're so kind to share that your favourite song on the album is ‘VHS’ and that's such a meaningful song because it is very much centred around the relationship that girls have with their moms. There was such a through line with all of these songs of having them be so much around my experiences in my life as they relate to gender. I knew going in that these songs were going to be about girlhood and coming into womanhood, and talking about the intricacies of the relationships in my familial life, or past partnerships, and how they relate to being a woman. It felt really important to me to be in rooms where I was working with people who could understand exactly what I was talking about without having to explain myself. I've worked with incredible collaborators of all sorts of gender backgrounds, and I've also worked with incredible collaborators that are men who also are kind of clueless sometimes and just don't understand exactly what I'm talking about. I've come into those moments before working with people who do have differing identities to me, and having this road block between both of us, where one of us just cannot understand a fundamental experience that I want to be talking about in a song. So the easiest way to bypass that is to work with people who are actively experiencing the same sort of identity that I'm walking through life with. I felt so lucky to work with an incredible team of women across the board on every aspect of this album. That just felt like a very obvious thing to do. It's crazy to me that that's not more common just because we see projects produced by men, released by men and no woman has touched anything in the entire creative process. I hope that it becomes less of a revolutionary thing to seek out people with common identities and write songs about them. That's one of the easiest things I've ever done, and I hope it becomes easier for the whole industry on a wider scale.
I couldn't let this interview go without talking about the amazing collaboration ‘the situation’ with Kero Kero Bonito, it is such a jam. The energy is incredible, and the complimentary sounds and voices and the little backing ‘oohs’, t's everything. Tell me, how did this track come together?
Oh my gosh, I had written ‘the situation’ in Nashville with my co writer Morgan (Nagler) and my producer, Carrie, and I just came in that day and I’d been thinking a lot about this morbid idea of dying, and how I'm getting older and less appealing from a societal viewpoint. They said that's a pretty depressing topic to write about, so let's try and make this more fun, and kind of tongue in cheek a little bit. We had the song for six months or something and we were thinking about potential features for the album, and I was trying to think of what songs could possibly be good, and ‘the situation’ came up. It's such a universal thing I think for women to feel like their value diminishes by the day, and it's a stupid, stupid thing that we are faced with. I thought it would be great to have another artist on the song that can speak to their own experiences, and I've been listening to Kero Kero Bonito for as long as I can remember, she was one of the first mixed race Asian women I saw in the pop space and really talking and making music about her identities, being a woman, and half Asian and living in England, and her experiences of navigating those worlds. I never dared to ask, but we reached out and she immediately said yes. I was just so star struck! But it just came together so naturally, I think her voice is one of the most unique voices I've ever heard in music, and I was just so delighted that she was willing to help out and be a part of the song.
What I think is so wonderful Is that track is so very much yours and Kero Kero Bonito’s in the sense that you both play off each other so beautifully. There's something very gracious about allowing space in that track. I think the girls are probably loving it. You know what I mean?
I think they are, and I'm so delighted by it. It's a really cool thing to be able to have a music project, it's an incredible thing to be able to involve your heroes. It was just such a pinch me moment to be able to do that. I was so excited when she said ‘yes’, I was like, ‘do whatever you want, I'll erase my whole voice from this track if you want, you can put whatever you want on it!’ She is just a star and such a kind collaborator and I think both of us just had an excitement of working with each other and really wanting to give each other the space to showcase the various skills that we have. I'm just excited I got to do that with her.
That’s amazing. And last one before I leave you. I wanted to know if there were one lyric on the album that just encapsulates the eye of the tornado for you, whether joyful or heartbreaking, what would it be?
Oh my gosh, I think probably one of my favourite lines on the whole record is ‘I'm feeling pretty small among the redwood trees / I want to count the rings deep inside of me’. I remember when I wrote that I was like, ‘whoa, I'm a writer.’ I remember just being so excited by it. It's kind of bittersweet in its nature of feeling really dwarfed by the enormity of your surroundings, but also recognising the similarities and the things that you carry within yourself, even in the moments that you feel small. It pays respect to growing up in California, talking about the redwood trees that I was so familiar with, talking about the years that I've spent being online and giving away myself to so many different people and really wondering how have I let myself age? How have I stunted myself, and how do I comprehend where I am in my life with all of the noise going on around me? So that one really sticks out to me. It really talks about a lot of what other themes are being covered on the liminal space. I was really proud of that one, for sure.
liminal space is our now via AWAL. You can buy and stream here
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KangHee Kim
