For an entire year, Mia Day woke up out of breath. Her father had left her mother, and her partner — the guitarist in her band at the time — soon followed suit. Unmoored and unglued, she made her way through each day doing the only thing that had ever made sense to her: writing music. Those songs, forged during what could only be described as a hell year, comprise the musician’s most vital release yet, Hellier, Forever (out May 17th), which takes its title from a supernatural docuseries Day and her partner used to watch about a spooky Kentucky town — and the fact that if you say its name fast enough, it sounds like 365 days of torture. “I made this album as a way to survive,” she says.

The Seattle musician grew up singing and playing guitar, writing her first song at 11, playing her inaugural show at 12, and dropping her debut album, Gold, at 18. Inspired by heroes like Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers and ‘90s mainstays Oasis and Radiohead, Day honed her skills at Loyola University in New Orleans, in the midst of which that hell year birthed some of the most intense music she’s ever made. “For months I didn't know what to do with myself, so I would just write songs every day.” All emotional turmoil culminated in 10 tracks of gut-wrenching, intense music that’s somehow more gorgeous in its upheaval. “It's also my scream-into-the-void album,” Day explains. “It’s me saying, ‘I will not disappear and I will not let a single person destroy me.’”
- Brenna Ehrlich

All’s fair in love and poetry... New album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. Out April 19 🤍

The New York Times once referred to Lady Rizo (né Amelia Zirin-Brown) as “a formidable belter who can sustain phrases and notes even when sprawled on her back on a piano and scissoring her legs.” Rizo, meanwhile, has called herself an artist with “an anarchist streak.” They both have a point.

A provocateur with an electric wit, Lady Rizo is a vessel for the spirits of Edith Piaf and Freddie Mercury. Like both, the NYC-based chanteuse—a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow—makes even the simplest sentiment feel voluminous on Indigo, her second album. 

“I love taking these beautiful, luxurious images or sounds and pressing them up to the very raw pain of existence,” she says. “Making people feel alive—grand and giant one moment, yet intimate and vulnerable the next.”

Her appeal is so expansive that artists are often drawn to her live show. And she has worked with many of them, including electro-pioneer Moby, musician-comedian Reggie Watts, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Adam Rapp, and classical-music legend Yo-Yo Ma. 

Indigo, in kind, traverses a landscape of sounds and visions: from “Hit of You,” which is the Shirley Bassey deep cut you’ve never heard, to the sex-and-lust boogaloo of “Under” to the dreamy-doomed Champs-Élysées lullaby “Chateau.” They are even more beguiling in the flesh. 

“I feed off the hit of the audience, the experience of live performance,” Lady Rizo says. “It is the most present I feel. And anything I do is to feel more present.”

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