Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography hit nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose. As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
You can imagine the appeal that ambient music might have to a perennial over-achiever: the chance to zero in and zone out, to weigh conflict without solving it, to be guided by drift rather than drive. With a blend of atmospheric beatmaking, gauzy harmonies, and impressionistic songwriting, Quiet Light’s music casts a distinct spell, like stumbling upon Imogen Heap in a forest clearing or imagining a Taylor Swift album produced by Harold Budd. Between learning to save lives and signing to True Panther, Mahesh has completed her seventh record, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2. It’s her highest-profile release to date, presenting the most refined showcase for her talents and offering promising clues to how the strands of her artistry connect.
Mahesh’s discography has evolved as a series of experiments, building out her sound from new angles without quite consolidating her full range. To date, Quiet Light has made forays into diaristic folk-pop (Going Nowhere), wispy witch house (Pure Hearts), Alex G experimentalism (Fourth of July), and loop-heavy voice note collages (Blue Angel Sparkling Silver). The musician is fond of describing her work as “dream sequences,” and much of it bears the loose logic and hazy texture that comes from never quite spelling out the whole story. Her songs are almost exclusively addressed to an elusive but powerful “you,” and their weight and intensity has varied with how well she’s been able to sketch in the detail of fraught but blurry scenes.
Lead single “Berlin” is her most gorgeously realized song to date. It begins with Mahesh’s feet planted firmly in the mud, overcome with the cold clarity you only find after bawling your eyes out. Over bleary harmonica, she sums up the agony of an unequal partnership, her Texas lilt softened around the edges by aching Auto-Tune. Just as it seems as though she’s found a measure of peace, a drum machine sends her reeling once again. Every detail snaps into focus: her lover’s recklessness, her helpless codependency, and the braided feelings of horror and tenderness that keep her inextricably bound to them. The song is reminiscent of Cassandra Jenkins’ masterpiece “Hard Drive,” serving up a cascade of small details over a shuffling dance beat that climaxes in a dreamy sax revelation. But Quiet Light’s breakthrough feels painfully short-lived. By the end of the song, you can’t tell whether the calm will last or whether she’s primed to spiral off once again.
Even if other tracks on BASS2 don’t quite rise to the same level, the record glows with new confidence. There’s still plenty of misty cooing, but her production feels more urgent and electric than ever. “Self Tape” surges through the speakers, riding a guitar line that builds and crashes like an unstoppable wave. “Angelic Photo” and “Star100” set vaporwave shards tumbling forward over skipping dance beats. On the latter song Mahesh pulls off an especially cool trick, chopping her own vocals into pure, disembodied texture, so that they land somewhere between Clairo and xaviersobased, though the sunny momentum is undercut slightly by the non sequitur voice memo: “I wonder if anyone ever goes through, like, a mid-life crisis and they just start, like, eating Bagel Bites every day?”
For most of the record, Mahesh samples the many flavors of crushing romantic failure. On “Sound of You Leaving,” she belts over desolate post-rock guitar, its lonesome twang sounding out the miles of negative space separating her from the rest of the world. “Postinternetfame” is an Auto-Tuned plea to be a reluctant dork’s very best girl. Over pinwheeling synths, Mahesh inhabits her narrator’s misplaced longing with gooey, heart-eyed delusion and sweetly pathetic determination. “God, I love you, we could have 10 kids/And move wherever you want,” she squeaks, “I’ll do anything that I need to do/To get you to stay.” “You Say I Love You” comes closest to “Berlin”’s high point: Realizing a partner only says “I love you” to placate her, Mahesh sets a pleading folk melody against a choppy dance beat, so that the frenetic drums match her racing mind and the weight of her dawning disappointment.
Despite the album’s high quality across the board, Mahesh still leaves a few ends loose. Her singing on “Living Room” and “Place You Can Fill” is buried so deep in the mix that the undercurrent of yearning doesn’t register loudly enough to complicate her airy beats. In some cases, like on “New Girls,” her songwriting stalls on repetition that the dynamism of her production can’t always overcome. But these feel like unfinished hems, rather than poorly conceived ideas. On the record’s many strengths and her remarkable back catalog (have you heard “Paloma” or “Fourth of July”?), it seems only a matter of time before her star emerges. On BASS2, it is thrilling to hear her let some light into her music’s fog.
