Until now, Saya Gray’s projects all shared a similar work-in-progress charm. The titles of her debut LP, 19 Masters, and subsequent QWERTY and QWERTY II EPs read like hastily typed placeholders that never got changed before being sent off to the label. On her second album, the Japanese-Canadian songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist allows her scavenged, fragmented art pop to cohere into something resembling a traditional breakup record. In place of previous releases’ slippery song structures and abstract lyrics, Saya instead draws intrigue from the complicated figure at its center: Gray can be fussy and prickly or regal and poised, her songs less an exploration of grandiose heartbreak than the quieter disappointment of realizing that the person you thought could handle all of you actually can’t. Which is a shame for them, because to meet Gray on her terms is to hear her make good on the promise of 2023’s “Preying Mantis!”, reiterated here on closing track “Lie Down”: “I can turn your dust into sparkles.”
If her older records were abstract-expressionist splatters, each song on Saya is more like a Dutch still life, gilded with immaculately detailed grape leaves and oyster shells. Tracks like “How Long Can You Keep Up a Lie?” could even elicit the dreaded C-word—conventional—if not for their thoughtfully applied production touches and Gray’s raw songwriting muscle. Elsewhere on the album, her collagist impulses still flourish, albeit in a more controlled fashion. Beginning as a blocky jazz-pop waltz, “Line Back 22” takes a hard swerve into a breakdown of drums and wordless vocalizing that would fit right in alongside Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music or Laurie Anderson’s Big Science.
In a bit of transitional magic, the last hiccuping pulse of “Line Back 22” melts seamlessly into “Puddle (Of Me),” one of Saya’s highest highs and, emotionally, maybe its lowest low. “You know how obsessed I can get/With your needle and thread pulling in and out of me,” Gray sings, nestled in an uncanny valley of backtracked guitars. It’s both a come-on and a capitulation—a little bit sad, a little bit sexy. The pleasure of complete submission, after all, is inseparable from the fear of opening yourself up to hurt. But ever the trickster, Gray flips the script on the lead single, “Shell (Of a Man),” and she’s going to make it sting: “If you don’t like me now, you’re gonna hate me later!” With its jaunty fingerpicking, “Shell” makes for a perfectly twee Trojan Horse, like handing Natalie Portman in Garden State a microphone, asking her to tell us how she really feels, then throwing the audio on the film’s Grammy award-winning soundtrack.
While much of Saya undercuts Gray’s bitterness with peppy tempos in major keys, a run of tracks in the album’s back half taps directly into its underlying doom and gloom. The mordant folk of “10 Ways (To Lose a Crown)” eventually disintegrates into ominous feedback, and “H.B.W”—an abbreviation for “heartbreak wake”—is anchored by a menacing trip-hop warble as Gray sinks into the quicksand of her own mourning. But she doesn’t sound weak at all; rather, in these miniature, dioramic compositions, Gray is downright massive, an Alice in Wonderland who ate the magic cake and has gleefully taken over the entire house limb by limb. By the penultimate track, “EXHAUST THE TOPIC,” the sorrow seems to be boring her; with 45 seconds left to go, she flips the proverbial FM dial to a rollicking, shoegazy nu-metal jam, complete with some sick guitar riffage. As much as a culmination of Gray’s past work, Saya is also a collection of portals, gazes into where she might take her artistry from here.
Fittingly, the album ends on a bitingly self-determined note, and an open-ended one, as the arpeggiating synthesizer of “Lie Down” carries back around to opener “..Thus Is Why (I Don’t Spring 4 Love).” If there’s one complaint to be levied against Saya as a whole, it’s that no other song quite clears the bar Gray sets for herself from the get-go. “..Thus Is Why” traces a straight line from Kate Bush to the Lindsey Buckingham-produced tracks on Tusk, wedding together sleigh bells, twangy pedal steel, popping bubble sound effects, and one of the hardest burns a synesthete could throw out: “You’ve got me colorless!” Any self-titled record that’s not an artist’s first invites the narrative that this is a reintroduction. Saya is more of a restoration: filling in the cracks of Gray’s music, redrawing her in bolder shades and more vivid hues—indigo, flesh tone, spring green. Just don’t fuck with the flowering, or you might find yourself pricked by her thorns.
