MARIA BC - HYALINE - indie exclusive limited edition vinyl

Hyaline is the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CA-based artist and songwriter, Maria BC.

Following last year's debut EP, Devil's Rain, which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria recorded Hyaline across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces. Their classically trained mezzo-soprano voice soars over raw, ethereal guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park - now almost unrecognizable - settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies.

Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens Hyaline to a "sonic collage." It's a project of patience and trusting the process.

Hyaline, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, songwriting is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it's this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it.

A knife's-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, Hyaline accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of spectres: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.