Some synth bloops and a waterfall of pedal steel—those are the textures adorning the opening beckons of Saya Gray’s sort-of-self-titled second album, SAYA. The Japanese-Canadian musician makes uber-unconventional pop music, reveling in a type of blasé art that dares to outmuscle any one denomination or label. SAYA, of course, is as good a gesture of intrigue as anything 2025 has offered thus far, as Gray makes her influence felt at all junctures of the project. Her singing is top-notch, and her production is as raw-hemmed and absorbing as the zig-zagging resolutions that turn robotic, far-ranging and obscure sounds into medleys of deeply beautiful abstraction. SAYA can make for a disorienting listen, if only because it strengthens Gray’s work-in-progress style of fragmentation. Each of these songs exist through lifetimes before concluding. It’s a fascinating approach, one that picks apart cohesive world-building in favor of cycling through many doorways.
And with each song on SAYA, Gray turns a new knob, unlocking a fresh vision that will, eventually, dissolve into the next idea quickly. It would be easy to label an album like this as a “pastiche,” but I think “pastoral” is a much better term for it. This music is vibrant and seemingly never-ending, as if Gray’s most critical intent is to challenge the very limitations of her own potential. It’s why SAYA is a shoegaze album, a metal album, an art-pop album, an electronic album and a folk album all rolled into one massive constellation of enjoyment. Every chapter is its own finale; every sound is anchored by its own oneness, never to be used again. There are choruses that will get stuck in your head (“SHELL ( OF A MAN )”), deep, vibrating atmospheres (“LINE BACK 22”) and psychedelic riffage (“EXHAUST THE TOPIC”). The result is expansive, yet so much of this album remains adrift. There’s power in that, in how something so sonically separate and restless can exist with so much confidence and humanity.
The country-fried collage of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE )” melts into the fingerpicking splendor of “SHELL ( OF A MAN ),” only to vanish into the jazzy, ineffable, submerged “LINE BACK 22,” which morphs dainty piano runs into damp, relaxed bass grooves. During “HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP UP A LIE?,” Gray manages to take fragmented production and jarring tonal shifts and soothe all of it into a spiraling balm, especially as she sings “I’m out of my mind for you” over and over. “PUDDLE ( OF ME )” is the emotional ballast of SAYA, arriving dreamy, delicate and full of surrender. Gray uses voodoo metaphors (“You play with me when you want to”) to illustrate a fractured dynamic of love and to connect threads of borrowed time and dissatisfaction. In the wake of a pandemic-born, bedroom-pop vernacular that has spawned thousands of songwriters making the same song over and over, Gray refuses to play it safe on “PUDDLE ( OF ME ),” emphasizing versatility over conventionality.
The second-half of SAYA is reflective and melancholic, as Gray sings of existential dread and navigates sonics that mirror the frustration. “EXHAUST THE TOPIC” is a choice example, a drain-circling song full of pedal steel, guitar swirls and cavalry-marching percussion. The “If you’re gonna break my heart and raise the bar, make sure you can reach it” refrain is divine, but it’s the “Will you call? Do I care? Dig a grave, fill the space, fall in love, fuck a friend, let it go, look for God” verse that lingers in the song’s soupy miasma. Even in SAYA’s messiest and most incongruous moments, Gray finds openings for intimacy in the chroma of her own heartbreak.
“CATS CRADLE!” is a minute-long interlude filled with spoken-word proverbs. “What’s your love like in real life? What’s your love like without leaving?” a Siri-like voice asks, as the instrumental flutters like harpsichord strings being plucked underwater. SAYA’s hues are like those of a breakup album; Gray explained in a press release that the album was written “after the dissolution of a troubled romantic entanglement.” And yet what plagues these songs is not a catastrophe bound to just one ache. “Since when has fame replaced great art?” is the question at the heart of “CATS CRADLE!” Loss, it has a frustrating habit of provoking life-spanning rejection. SAYA is a survey of both worth and want.
Even the album’s musical low-point, “H.B.W,” is plumed by vignettes of a love fighting against mistrust, like the lines “there’s a graveyard in my dreams, I lay a flower once a week” and the “woke up in a heartbreak wake” chorus. “10 WAYS ( TO LOSE A CROWN )” is a cautionary tale pressed with imagery of queens, mistakes made and mourned, and the double entendre of 2020, of both the calendrical and hindsight circumstance. “I’ve been alone and I care more than I could ever let you know,” Gray sings, before plucky acoustics nose-dive into a room of noisy crescendos. “LIE DOWN..” is a sublime finale measured by the wonders of who gets forgotten and who gets to recover in the refuge of language. “How green is the grass on the other side?” Gray questions, rustling in the idiom, catapulted by slithering bass notes and transmissions of vocal fragments.
In 2022, Gray’s debut album, 19 MASTERS, felt like an asymmetrical launch pad for art-pop’s next savant. And her EPs, QWERTY and QWERTY II, displayed an ability to make stripped-back noises sound larger-than-life. SAYA is confirmation that her music is its own kind of cinema. These songs are spiritual, even in their cell-splicing beats, reverb sonar and drive-you-mad transitions; the guitars are intricate and the rhythms lope and twang through wounded frames. Gray’s classical background (her mom founded the Discovery Through the Arts school in Toronto and her dad is an acclaimed trumpeter) makes for good context, as SAYA is its own body and brain, a breakup exercise full of epic, idiosyncratic stories of farewell and mourning cut up into an all-encompassing and all-evading menagerie of trip-hop, psych-folk, prog-rock, glitch-tronica and dubby fusion. Written on a retreat to Japan during the comedown of 2023, Saya Gray has colored reinvention in 10 stages of grief, setting nebulas aglow in the dust, in the bizarre and in the bold.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
