mxmtoon: “Liminality is really central to where I am right now in life”

mxmtoon unpacks family dynamics and the weight of growing up with her vulnerable new album, ‘liminal space’.

Words: Abigail Firth.

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Have you ever found yourself in a shopping centre after all the stores have closed and the customers have gone home? How about in an airport terminal at a weird hour, wandering past endless vending machines and empty waiting rooms? Maybe you’ve visited your old school as an adult, or stayed late alone at the office, or walked down a particularly long hotel corridor, but the chances are, at some point, you’ve encountered a liminal space.

An internet lore-ridden phenomenon amongst Zillennials, liminal spaces are defined by ageing buildings devoid of life, silent except for the humming florescent lights above, and conjure up a sense of unease and strange familiarity while passing through. There’s no obvious threat in a liminal space, but the uncertainty and loneliness of the surroundings is enough to shake you.

The feeling of being caught in a liminal space has been hanging over mxmtoon lately, throughout the recording of her third album and the period that preceded it, actually, so much so that the phrase became the title of the album.

Having been a part of the gaming world for as long as she can remember, mxmtoon (or Maia, as she’s otherwise known, her surname impressively still kept under wraps) found herself in the YouTube rabbit hole of the video essayists discussing the ability to ‘no-clip’ out of reality and into ‘the backrooms’, a fictional level of endless liminal space. So, what’s all this got to do with indie-pop, then?

“I was doing more research into liminal space, generally speaking, and the idea of liminality and why, when we look at a photo of an abandoned mall, what emotion that evokes out of us. It’s this sense of nostalgia and sadness and also fear that comes up too of being confronted with something that feels familiar but also feels absent,” says Maia. “I think that that was a lot of what I was going through at my life at that point, and still, even to this day, liminality is really central to where I am right now in life, and the transition period of coming from one place to another and kind of getting lost in between in the process. It felt like a perfect marriage of two different things that I was thinking about heavily, something that I was really into in a nerdy perspective, and then also something that I was going through in an emotional perspective.”

“It’s definitely the heaviest project I’ve released”

She’s had a turbulent couple of years, not that you’d really know because she’s been keeping it to herself. Despite what the album’s titular subject might suggest, Maia’s been making a conscious effort to be less online and to publish less online, instead channelling the difficult things she’s going through into the music. As a result, ‘liminal space’ has an emotional weight to it that debut ‘the masquerade’ and follow-up ‘rising’ disguised. 

Having started releasing music as a teenager, the mxmtoon sound has shifted from ukulele-indebted bedroom pop, gradually introducing poppier elements to create post-pandemic sadbangers; her lyricism shifted too, with Maia coming further out of her shell with each release. Her next move feels less like growth and more like wiping the slate clean.

“It’s definitely the heaviest project I’ve released,” she reflects. “I’ve had songs in the past that are really sad, but being conscious on projects where I’ve included those songs that are really about untangling grief and processing loss in the midst of other songs that are also about not being sad, trying to figure out a way to find levity. I think with this one, there are moments of that, but there’s also a real sense of sitting with it that I don’t know if I’ve necessarily had on past projects, and allowing myself to express those emotions and not move on from them immediately. Obviously, I started really young, so the projects that I release will kind of grow up with me, but this is maybe the first one ever where I felt really like an adult at every single stage of the process of making it.”

The catalyst for this album’s creation was her mum’s cancer diagnosis last year, something she’s barely discussed publicly yet, but which left Maia unpacking her relationship with her mother. That quickly spiralled into thinking about her other familial relationships and the complicated feelings she has around each of them. She admits that a few years ago, her coping strategy would’ve involved taking to Twitter to find solace in her followers; stepping away from the screen to navigate those feelings alone and with the people around her meant ‘liminal space’ would end up being the most ‘grown up’ mxmtoon album by far.

“A lot of these songs are really vulnerable in a different capacity than they have been in past records and past releases. It’s really hard to be a musician in the position of having to express your emotions and be vulnerable, while also knowing that it’s going to be consumed by so many people, including your family. In the past, I’ve written these songs that are honest to a certain degree, but also cushion these feelings that are maybe uglier and harder to navigate and really difficult to express. So my relationship with my family has really changed, because when I was making these songs, I did take a conscious effort to make them without worrying about what my parents would think about them.”

The first taste of the album, ‘i hate txas’ is familiar territory for mxmtoon listeners, a tongue-in-cheek post-breakup tale of escapism backed by a fresh take on her usual acoustic pop, now incorporating a more country-driven sound. Follow up single ‘the situation’ takes on her old habits using humour to hide real anxieties, this time it’s women’s expiration dates, and recruiting Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori for a verse.

“She was one of the first Wasian artists that I was ever aware of, and so because of that, I think I just felt this insane amount of admiration for the fact that she was out there making music that was so fun, and also so inclusive of her background of being Japanese and then also being British; I’d never seen that before. I was thinking that’s a really funny song because it sounds so playful and fun, and then it’s also about dying and losing your societal value as you become increasingly less attractive over the years. I remember thinking, who has the greatest voice for hard to tackle topics that sounds so bubbly? arah has the voice for that.”

“I almost called the record ‘eldest daughter’”

A crucial part of ‘liminal space’ is how intrinsically linked to Maia’s cultural identity it is, so it was important throughout the creation process to work with a full-female team and collaborate with other mixed race white-Asian artists, also picking up multi-instrumentalist Luna Li to add strings and vocals to ‘now’s not the time’. 

That’s the track that most explicitly breaks down the relationship Maia has with her mother at various points in her life, and the track she was most nervous to show her. ‘number one boy’ similarly discusses Maia’s relationship with her father, comparing it to her younger brother’s, as a result of growing up with similar interests that weren’t necessarily as encouraged in her as they were in her brother.

“I almost called the record ‘eldest daughter’,” she says, “because I feel like these songs are so emblematic of the experience of being a firstborn child, specifically being a daughter. It’s really interesting as a daughter to think about how my relationship with my dad will always be different than my brother’s relationship with him, and so kind of dissecting that and wondering, does my brother ever want to be my mom’s number one girl sometimes? The familiarity and relationship that you receive with your parent if you share an identity with them, is so fundamentally different than it is if you don’t.”

In a literal transitional period as we speak, she’s packing up her apartment to move to Nashville, Tennessee, which happens to be the place she’d recorded the album. The country capital is indirectly the reason ‘liminal space’ has an unmistakable twang to it – her beloved ukulele is put aside, replaced momentarily by a banjo – weaving together singer-songwriter vulnerability, vibrant world-building and subtle Southern influence in a way that recalls Mitski’s most recent project ‘The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’. Having met Mitski at the point in which she moved to Nashville in 2019, Maia sees an uncanny resemblance to the path she’s going down in her own career now. 

The next single to be released ahead of the album also happens to be one of the first songs written for it, ‘rain’. “It’s about the idea of moving back to California,” says Maia, “and I feel like so much of the record is about these spaces in between decisions that you have to make and figuring out where to go next.”

It’s the track that best encapsulates both the record and where she’s at right now: the never-ending questioning if the grass is greener elsewhere, stuck in the limbo of looking back, thinking of the future, and ending up only floating along in the present. As she sings on it, she’s not sure where she’s going next, but when the journey so far has been this complicated, there’s comfort to be found in the liminal space, too.

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. mxmtoon’s album ‘liminal space’ is out 1st November.