Tweeness is an art-form few have successfully mastered. The ones who do it well—She & Him, Belle and Sebastian, Frankie Cosmos—have a distinct enough vision, a compelling enough sound, and palpable enough confidence in their ideas that their whimsy becomes fertile ground to build from rather than a tacked-on crutch to hide behind. Actor/singer Maya Hawke has frequently gravitated toward this sensibility, channeling a charming-awkward indie-girl archetype in her various on-screen performances, like her breakthrough role on the Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things, and her output as a musician. But despite her evident passion for the creative process and the crackling purr in her vocals that are well-suited for this aesthetic, Hawke’s range and talent as an artist has sometimes felt too limited to fully transcend the box that twee has trapped her in.
Hawke’s first three records—2020’s Blush, 2022’s MOSS, and 2024’s Chaos Angel—were pleasant and polished yet slight and safe, speckled with poetic lyrics and a mellow style reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones but never quite matching their emotional death. Perhaps that’s why Hawke is now attempting to go bigger than she’s ever gone before on Maitreya Corso, its peculiar title named after the fictitious magical misfit of a fantasy world Hawke conceived for the album.
Maitreya Corso’s loose storybook conceit earns Hawke points for taking a creative risk—she’s even gone so far as to redesign her website around it—and it acts as an intriguing framework for exploring adult disillusionment and youthful whimsy. But as Hawke, or rather her mythical stand-in, gets lost in this world she’s constructed for herself, the album seems to be doing the same thing, becoming a little too infatuated with its own wide-eyed ambition and consequently ending up unfocused and navel-gazing. It’s her most adventurous effort to date. It’s also her clunkiest, the equivalent of when a kid shows you their drawing and rambles excitedly about it and you nod along politely, even though you don’t quite understand what’s so special about what they made.
Like her previous records, Maitreya Corso is guided by technically assured production from Hawke and her husband/creative partner Christian Lee Houston, whose own solo work has a similarly amiable indie folk-pop vibe. The two of them, along with Hawke’s other regular collaborators Benjamin Lazar Davis and Jonathan Low, imbue the album with tender, delicate instrumentation that properly evokes a fairy/folktale ambiance. Opener “Love of My Life” is one of the project’s strongest tracks, a Jon Brion-style jam contoured with country-pop twang that gives real bite to Hawke’s buoyant pining. “Heavy Rain” is an inspired highlight, filled with uber-lovely guitar riffs and wispy Fleet Foxes-adjacent self-harmonizing from Hawke. The swaggering, jangly distortion of “Green Dragon” also adds a catchy, compelling edge to Hawke’s associative images of growing up during the early-Aughts.
But as Maitreya Corso chugs along, much of the adornments that initially conjured its enchanting atmosphere struggle to stick. They start to feel like window dressing for naggingly clunky, at times wince-inducing songwriting, which seems more interested in the sound and construction of certain lyrical arrangements rather than their substance and weight. Hawke’s stream-of-consciousness speak-singing reflects this indulgent affection for clever rhyme schemes, often sounding like a cross between a college slam poet and a late-period Eminem. In “Last Thoughts on Morning Star,” for instance, Hawke attempts to exorcise conflicted feelings around a difficult relationship with a former ex, but there are particular pairings of words (“We were casual / If not supernatural / I was just collateral”) and stylized line deliveries (the drawl in “collaterallllll”) that only end up distracting from what’s being explored.
Other songs like “Terms of Estrangement,” “Maitreya and the Way Back,” and “Last Living Lost Cause” fall prey to this impressionistic overkill as well, painting pictures that are vivid yet contrived (“You’re different now than I remember / Salt and pepper / Piss and vinegar”), bluntly lewd in a way that jars harshly against the album’s predominantly wholesome tone (“The car stopped at a traffic light / I stuck my tongue down your throat from the passenger side”), or both (“I was all eyes / Tits and teeth / Pouring coconut rum over plastic palm trees”). Perhaps it’s a net positive that Maya Hawke is experimenting a little more with her modest template, even if the quality of the execution doesn’t quite meet the excitement in the intent. But the risks taken on Maitreya Corso stand out in all the wrong ways, its twee fantasy concept functioning as a feeble portal into a world that doesn’t elicit much curiosity. [Mom+Pop]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
