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.
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