Maya Hawke has announced a new album. The multi-hyphenate will share Chaos Angel on May 31 via Mom + Pop Music.
The 10-song Chaos Angel follows the artist's 2022 sophomore album MOSS, which landed Hawke on the cover of Exclaim! magazine that year.
As for its titular figure, a release recounts how Hawke "imagined a figure raised to believe they were a god of love, only to move through the world and realize they were instead leaving wreckage and ruin in their wake."
Hawke finds a parallel between herself and the character who is said to be "part guardian, part alter-ego, part imaginary friend," the album's 10 songs cataloguing "the patterns we repeat while growing older, wandering astray, and finding our way back to some core understanding of ourselves."
"On the journey home, she goes back through all the places she thought she destroyed," Hawke explains of the Chaos Angel. "And in the rubble, wonder and beauty and magic grew."
First single "Missing Out" arrives alongside today's announcement, and you can hear it alongside an accompanying video directed by Alex Ross Perry below. Hawke drew inspiration for her latest from a time living near her brother's college campus, which allowed her a taste of post-secondary life she herself did not experience.
Of "Missing Out," she shares, "There was actually a girl who went to Brown, where my brother goes to college, and we were all going around saying what our wish was for ourselves. She said, I want to write the next great American novel. It was the moment where I felt older than everyone because I laughed so hard. I was like, 'You are so far down the wrong track!' Wish to write a novel. That would be a miracle. Don’t wish to write the next great American novel, that's a nightmare! It made me feel I actually am a different place in my life than these people I was around. It totally inspired this whole song."
Chaos Angel was produced by Hawke's co-writer and collaborator Christian Lee Hutson, and features contributions by longstanding collaborators Benjamin Lazar Davis and Will Graefe, and new faces like Bleachers' touring drummer Michael Riddleberger and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.
Chaos Angel:
1. Black Ice
2. Dark
3. Missing Out
4. Wrong Again
5. You're Okay
6. Better
7. Big Idea
8. Hang In There
9. Promise
10. Chaos Angel