- Dirty Hit
- 2025
“There’s a graveyard in my dreams/ I lay a flower once a week/ For you and me.” The way Saya Gray sings these words on “H.B.W.,” a standout of her new album SAYA, you can almost see her still wearing her mourning veil, meandering through endless headstones. The phrase comes in a vacillating melody, sounding like something between a seance and a playground song. Maybe you’re familiar with the feeling; everybody thinks their worst breakup is the worst breakup anyone has ever endured, at least while they’re in the thick of it. SAYA, out this Friday, won’t remind you how things will get better or how true love will find you in the end. The end, as far as Gray can tell in this moment, is right now.
SAYA was written, per its liner notes, “after the dissolution of a troubled romantic entanglement.” Gray found reprieve in solo travel: In fall 2023, she booked a flight to her mother’s native country of Japan, and then she embarked on a cross-country road trip. Travels as epic as these deserved a soundtrack to match, and so Gray immersed herself in the expansive discographies of artists like the Beatles and fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell.
Those artists might strike you as unusual references for Gray if you’ve heard her first full-length project, 2022’s delightfully chaotic 19 Masters. While that record put her on the map as an alt-pop force, Gray’s extensive musical background leans more traditional. Her dad is a trumpet player and composer who’s performed with Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald, while her mother founded the Toronto music school Discovery Through The Arts over four decades ago. Gray was playing piano chords before she could even form sentences, and she rotated through numerous instruments growing up. “My brain barely thinks about music. It’s just in my body,” she has explained. “It was bred into my subconscious, you know? ‘This is what we do as a family.’” And so while SAYA is Gray’s proper debut LP, arriving at the beginning of her official musical career, its context reads more like Hejira or Sgt. Pepper -- self-reflection and discovery after a period of deep exploration.
While 19 Masters and 2023’s dual EPs QWERTY and QWERTY II implemented some piercing electric guitar and experimented with noisy, at times almost industrial production, SAYA wraps up Gray’s genre-agnostic approach into some of her most polished, concise work yet. Here, she typically weaves her intricate acoustic guitars into trap-filtered beats, airy reverb, and soulful vocals. In spite of all those outward influences, SAYA is deeply insular right down to its conception. On that aforementioned solo road trip, for example, Gray kept her guitar in the car beside her so that she could pluck away the moment inspiration struck.
Immediate and intuitive, SAYA plays like a string of dispatches delivered straight from the throes of heartache. “You’re an expensive friend/ I’m gonna move to California for ya/ How did I get here again?” she sings on the chipper folk-pop tune “Puddle,” harnessing a subdued rage against all the wishy-washy lovers who are not really looking for anything serious right now even when the emotional bond feels anything but casual. “You know there’s a puddle of me at your feet, isn’t that what you needed of me?/ You know how obsessed I can get with your needle and thread pulling in and out of me.” Songs like “Shell Of A Man” flip outlaw-country guitar riffs into kiss-offs where Gray is the star of her own spaghetti Western, chanting, “If you don’t like me now, you’re gonna hate me later/ Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
And I promise that spelling of “peace” is intentional -- a threat of withholding reconciliation hidden in an unassuming idiom. Gray is a noted fan of double entendres and wordplay, wielding the ambiguities of the English language to her creative advantage. The viscous album closer “Lie Down” spotlights this affinity of hers: “How green is the grass on the other side?” she ponders, as if with a blasé eye-roll to everyone who's told her to just keep her chin up. Elsewhere, her chromatic surname becomes a potential grisly fate -- “If I lie down in this life would you mention me/ Would you mention me to your family/ Or let my name fade to grey?” Her birth year, 1995, turns her sentimentality into a full-time job she can't quit: “I’ve been this way circa nine-to-five.” If humor is a coping mechanism, Gray is excellent at it while maintaining the intensity of whatever she’s coping with in the first place.
Tony Tulathimutte begins his hit 2024 short story collection Rejection with a fitting quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: They build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.” I think of that excerpt when I listen to SAYA, an album born out of the type of rejection we’re all destined to experience ourselves at least once. It’s a feat of finding the harmony between all-consuming grief and a personal responsibility to rebuild. “I’ve been looking for a god every day, it’s a symptom of the system,” Gray laments on the sleek, cinematic penultimate track “Exhaust The Topic.” “Maybe it’s ‘cause I’ve been looking for a love I’ve never given.” And maybe that’s the key to enduring a spell at rock bottom -- knowing how and when to look up.
SAYA is out 2/21 via Dirty Hit.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Anxious' Bambi
• Youth Lagoon's Rarely Do I Dream
• Tim Hecker's Shards
• Silas Short's LUSHLAND
• Emile Mosseri's Trying To Be Born
• Brother Ali's Satisfied Soul
• Baths' Gut
• Killswitch Engage's This Consequence
• Roddy Ricch's The Navy Album
• Patterson Hood's Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
• Basia Bulat's Basia’s Palace
• Katy Pinke's Strange Behavior
• Caspian Coberly's Starlight
• Tate McRae's SO CLOSE TO WHAT
• Luke Sital-Singh's Fool's Spring
• Anna Shoemaker's Someone Should Stop Her
• Abdomen's Yes, I Don't Know
• Ider's Late To The World
• The Wombats' Oh! The Ocean
• Abel Selaocoe's Hymns Of Bantu
• Max Frost's Shelby Ave
• Jules Reidy's Ghost/Spirit
• Cristina Vane's Hear My Call
• Traitors' Phobias
• Laurie Torres' Après coup
• Miami Horror's WE ALWAYS HAD TOMORROW
• Colin Self's respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis
• Sam Fender's People Watching
• The Young Mothers’ Better If You Let It
• G-Eazy's Helium
• The Murder Capital's Blindness
• Gaytheist's The Mustache Stays
• Wrekmeister Harmonies' Flowers In The Spring
• Mandrake Handshake's Earth-Sized Worlds
• Keiichiro Shibuya's ANDROID OPERA MIRROR
• Mean Mistreater's Do Or DieLive At Rare Bird Farm: A Benefit Album For Western North Carolina
• Cici Arthur's Way Through
• Nachtblut's Todschick
• The Stylistics' Falling In Love With My Girl
• Scour's Gold
• Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band's Honeysuckle
• Q Lazzarus' Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives Of Q Lazzarus
• Nao's Jupiter
• One Ok Rock's Detox
• Silverstein's Antibloom
• Hirax's Faster Than Death
• Sacrifice's Volume Six
• Masma Dream World's PLEASE COME TO ME
• Children Of The Night's Children Of The Night
• Califone's The Villagers Companion
• David Lee Roth's The Warner Recordings 1985-1994 Box Set
• Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim & Joey Chang's Muzosynth Orchestra
• Justin Tyson's The Paper Doors
• Canyons And Locusts' The Goal Gigolo
• Puma Blue's antichamber
• Chicken P's Lit 4 Ever
• Dirty Honey's Mayhem And Revelry Live
• Ghost On TV's Mister Silence
• TSHA's Sad Girl Remixes EP
• Isabel Pless's Workhorse
• Four Seconds Ago's 1000 Needles
• Sir Woman's If It All Works Out
• Nao's Jupiter
• Ellis Mano Band's MORPH
• Silos' APOCALIPS
• Morray's Long Story Short
• Cash & Skye's Just A Stranger
• Bren Joy's SUNSET BLACK
• Jim Ghedi's Wasteland
• The Young Mothers' Better If You Let It
• Jesse Welles' Middle
• Children Of The Night's Children Of The Night
• Chase Matthew's CHASE
• Devi Mambouka's Masma Dream World
• Imagine Dragons' Reflections (From The Vault Of Smoke + Mirrors)
• Porridge Radio's Machine Starts To Sing EP
• Hannah McFarland's Broken Hearts EP
• Rockabye Baby!'s Lullaby Renditions Of Bad Bunny
• Ray Bull's Little Acts Of Violence EP
• Maruja's Tir na nÓg EP
• Cartel Bo's PABLO EP
• Zoe Ko's not ur girlfriend EP
• The Slaps' Mud Tracks EP
• JoBoxers' The Complete Works 1983-1986
• Spy's Seen Enough EP
• Blockhead's It's Only A Midlife Crisis If Your Life Is Mid EP
• WHO SHOT SCOTT's BRAIN (SIDE B) EP
• CHALK's Conditions III EP
• Trupa Trupa's Mourners EP
• Glixen's quiet pleasures EP
• The Dark's The Dark EP
• Nicolas Bougaïeff's Primal Extensions EP
• Rafiq Bhatia's Each Dream, A Melting Door EP
