If you were on social media in 2023, you couldn’t scroll very long without hearing Gia Margaret’s delicate, spare “Hinoki Wood.” A little bit Brian Eno, a little bit Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, that melancholic piano melody backgrounded wistful beach B-roll and day-in-my-lifes, a bittersweet evocation whose virality began with a dog meme. Three years later, a major shift: Singing, like its title would suggest, is an on-the-nose singer-songwriter record in more ways than one. Its song structures are mostly conventional and confessional, melodies that wear an easy groove in your ear. The less obvious part is the erstwhile ambient instrumentalist’s return to her own voice. A years-long vocal cord injury and recovery process pushed her toward the previous records’ ambience without much choice, and this LP is the first return since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer to what she calls an “old part” of herself, expressive and lyrical.
Aptly, the vocals on Singing are practically neon-lit, the clear foreground of the album’s front half. Margaret’s voice is close and warm, sometimes near-whispered and elsewhere like she’s leaning forward from the backseat of the car. She wields her voice with the same control and finesse as the piano on her previous LP, 2023’s Romantic Piano. No belt, no bravado, just presence. The result is that the listener leans closer—we are primed for revelation, ready to marvel.
Album opener “Everyone Around Me Dancing” epitomizes this intimacy. A slow-burning, anhedonic ode to being a wallflower, it throbs with Massive Attack synths that alternately sound like a heartbeat or a breathing machine, a steady counterpoint to Margaret’s breathy sing-song. “Everyone around me is dancing/But I am in the background static,” she intones, bell-clear, her consonants pinging in the microphone. Arve Henriksen’s trumpet is a celestial contrast to the vocals’ groundedness, a floater at the edge of the song’s smoky peripheral vision. Here, we are close and intimate—the syrupy pace and revelatory lyrics are a whispered secret against a wood-panelled wall.
We toggle across this record between the same core sounds—crisp acoustic guitar, modular synths, analog drum machines, and Margaret’s alto. In some instances, these ingredients render a feast, and in others, barely a 7/11 haul. “Cellular Reverse”’s sunny melody skews everything more “lo-fi hip hop beats for studying.” The lyrics—elsewhere evocative—wilt dramatically, a slurry of platitudes. “If my star didn’t burn out, would we know?/If lightning doesn’t go/Will anything glow?” Margaret sings near the end of the song. Here, we are transported from a pulsing house party basement to a chain coffee shop—from music that catches our attention across a crowded room to the kind that fades easily behind an espresso machine. Later, a series of “do do do’s” feel so painfully twee they border on the “hey ho” school of stomp-clap. “Good Friend” is an uptempo, top-of-register ditty that feels aspartame sweet, a pharma ad waiting to happen. Even its final bars of Gregorian chanting, one of many bells and whistles stuffed between the mawkish choruses, can’t lift this track out of the morass.
But elsewhere Margaret—who produced the record with longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman—arranges the same core sounds into more interesting, textured configurations, wielding millennial touchstones without the baggage. “Alive Inside”’s playful Auto-Tune leans Imogen Heap, whereas its rich, low basslines—emphasized by a millisecond of silence—come straight from Aaron Dessner’s playbook. They’re delightful, as is closer “E-Motion,” whose rich guitar tones and stacks of Auto-Tuned vocals sound like an android choir. “God damn, tell me anything you’ve thought,” she and her computerized doppelgangers sing in harmony, and as Adam Schatz’s saxophone crests, it feels like the end of a journey from the album’s dazed opener. Even with its unnecessary detours, Singing reaches this wild reverie in the end—a voice reclaimed to report, softly, from the fathomless depths of the human experience.
