by Manila Bulletin Entertainment
With darkly fantastical lyrics and kaleidoscopic arrangements that pull from pop, punk, and electronic music, LA-via-Baltimore artist mazie is helming the next evolution of psychedelic pop.
Today (Feb. 24), mazie shares her ambitious debut album, blotter baby (a nod to her love of hallucinogens), along with a trippy music video for “are you feeling it now.” The 23-year-old confronts coming-of-age heartbreak and a Gen-Z doom mindset with catharsis and absurdity throughout her self-described “exploration into psychedelia.”
blotter baby traverses decades of psychedelic rock influences; arriving in 2023 to meet mazie’s brazen and fatalistic lyricism, and Elie Rizk’s (Bella Poarch, Remi Wolf) polished alt-pop production. Through ’60s and ’70s-inspired pop hooks, mazie shamelessly sings of sapphic makeout sessions (“girls just wanna have sex”), wanting to look hot at her own funeral (“i look good”), and her own toxic relationship patterns.
The sonic references range from bouncy Beach Boys-esque chords (“life is a long goodbye”) to dreamy beats that echo Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (“somebody to lose”). mazie leans into her own intuition for infectious, earwormy pop with tracks like “menace” and the spacey “are you feeling it now.” The album also features her massive hit “dumb dumb,” a manic anthem that has since gained more than 250 million global streams, 1 million TikTok creates, and a feature in Netflix’s original film Do Revenge.
mazie describes the journalistic record as her “biggest investment into songwriting,” attesting, “Every song I’ve ever made has actively been a reflection of me being in my life – all of the songs were me sitting in the studio unpacking my life at that exact moment.” She says of the writing process for blotter baby, “During this album, I was never writing song just for the sake of writing it.” mazie demonstrates her flair for floral lyricism in songs like “as it was before it how it ends,” singing, “i was walkin’ to andromeda / observin’ the phenomena / to help me clear my mind/ from my / delusion of grandeur / lookin’ for answers / to why.” But she knows when and where to cut a cheeky dig, like in the friend-breakup “all i ever wanted (was you)”- “you hate yourself cuz you hate your mom / your mom hates me and i hate your mom,” or the deceptively upbeat “give up!” where she exclaims, “when i gave up everything got better!”
Psychedelia, as both a musical genre and therapeutic practice, is integral to mazie’s artistry and the sonic infrastructure of blotter baby. She explains, “I use psychedelics to connect with my humanity and personal psychology. I feel as though my relationship with psychedelics has emboldened my understanding of intersectionality, strengthened my empathy, and all around made me a better and more understanding person.” Drawing upon those experiences, mazie illuminates her emotional truths in tracks like the breakup-confessional “it’s not me (it’s u),” and the optimistic light towards the end of the tracklist, “u and i will always be okay.”
All the while, she gleans inspiration from both classic psychedelic rock influences (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead) and modern acts of the genre (Crumb, Tame Impala, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard). Fragments of mazie’s muses are refracted through her prismatic rose-colored glasses, exemplified in “another life,” “all i ever wanted (was you),” and “life is a long goodbye.”
Having studied classical and jazz singing from an early age, mazie found her online breakthrough with 2020’s “no friends,” the whimsical debut single she crafted with then-neighbor and producer Elie Rizk. Taking the success as a sign to drop out of college, move to Los Angeles, and never look back, mazie then quickly issued the rainbow cassette, her debut 2021 EP that became what she calls “an ode to an ending of my childhood.” Now pushing her artistry into more over-the-top, vulnerable, and musically adventurous territory with blotter baby, mazie is now emerging as a multifaceted icon who’s aspirationally imperfect. “I hope people can see themselves in me, but I’m definitely not the first person you’d think of to ‘set a good example,’” she says with a laugh.
