Maya Hawke Gets Mythological on Chaos Angel
The singer, songwriter, and actress returns with more witty folk-pop that can get mired in half-hearted experiments.
If you step foot onto a college campus, ask any student who Maya Hawke is. There’s a good chance they’ll have seen her perform in the third and fourth seasons of Stranger Things, Netflix’s record-breaking sci-fi drama. If you ask a student wearing Blundstones who Maya Hawke is, there’s a strong chance they’ll have listened to her music, too. While the 25-year-old is best known for her celebrity pedigree and screen-acting, she’s now three albums deep into a folk-tinged indie pop career that is growing similarly prominent. Chaos Angel is latest effort, released just shy of four years after her debut, Blush. Stylistically, Hawke found her lane fast, releasing understated lyrical pop that touches on her at-once extraordinary and relatable life. Chaos Angel is exactly that, this time chronicling a cycle of love, loss and resurrection—her astute lyricism remaining the backbone of an album that can veer toward stylistically clumsy choices.
Hawke opens Chaos Angel with “Black Ice,” a lullaby waltz featuring the softest of guitars, a suite of guest vocalists and the occasional spoken word recording. “Give up, be loved,” Hawke utters time and time again, as her guest vocalists—Christian Lee Hutson, her brother Levon, Jesse Harris, Will Graefe, her Stranger Things co-star Sadie Sink, Eliza Lamb and Fiona Agger—enter one-by-one, contributing to a proper climax before preventing it from ever actuating. “Dark” follows with a charming minimalism and appropriately cheesy lyrics (“I’m your guitar / Mute me gently / With the palm of your hand”), and while the distorted electric guitar in the song’s midpoint does represent a kind of messy breakthrough, it’s hard to justify such an ungraceful move on an album where Hawke is otherwise shooting for poise.
The handful of tracks on Chaos Angel that wade into distortion, which is growing ever-popular with the recent runaway successes of Wednesday and Slow Pulp, do not suit Hawke’s more conversational approach to delivery. “Okay,” while catchy, overshadows her otherwise strong lyricism at all moments, save for when she repeats, “If you’re okay, then I’m okay.” While it’s an interesting representation of codependency, a novel one it is not. “Missing Out” is an especially charming song with narrative flow and kinetic tune with a guitar solo that feels out of place, messy for mess’s sake. That said, “Not Now Not Never,” a one-minute Auto-Tuned chant, is a fascinating detour that shows Hawke can venture away from her typical sound without compromising what has made her musical output viable: her words. While the acoustic guitar remains her trusty companion, she has some promising allies in electronics.