Saya Gray : SAYA
When exploring Saya Gray’s output in the order it was released, it’s hard not to see it as fragmentary. Her 2022 debut album 19 MASTERS is presented like a collection of demos, most of its tracks little more than her sonorous voice echoing in an empty space. Her 2024 two-part QWERTY EPs series introduced more pronounced acoustic noodling. Her amorphous production and inclination for conventional pop structures were pleading to be merged into a cohesive whole. Fortunately, her sophomore album SAYA is the distillation of those disparate parts, born out of a romantic falling-out and subsequent retreat to Japan, with Gray cozying up with an acoustic guitar prepared to channel her processing.
This direction placing universal heartbreak front and center does dilute her immersive auditory abstractions. However, her immaculate string work keeps her uniqueness in check. “..Thus is Why.. ( I Don’t Spring 4 Love )” is a springtime frolic, though the rosy overtone shields Gray’s defeat—“This is why I don’t fall in love in springtime”—her words are accompanied by tonal shifts as sudden as changing seasons, painting lost love as an equally natural occurrence. “Shell (of a Man)” is a bouncy fingerpicking jaunt, where Gray foreshadows her significant other’s distaste: “If you don’t like me now / You’re gonna hate me later.” Those words are extracted from QWERTY II’s “! MAVIS BEACON,” once snakelike in its first incarnation, but now sounding rather playful.
For her unflinching proclivity towards soured love, Gray sacrifices the braver moments that made her previous works surprising. The vacant, nebulous backdrops of “Cats Cradle!” and “10 Ways (To Lose a Crown),” as pretty as they sound, are a bit one-note following her unchanging pedal steel and soft-spoken balladry. When Gray also bizarrely adopts tried-and-true trap beats on “H.B.W,” she loses her singular artistry by bewilderingly conforming to everyone else.
Gray saves SAYA’s true gut punches for the end. The penultimate track “Exhaust the Topic” trades warbly pedal steel for reverberant, trepidatious riffs, its brooding mood a result of Gray strongly dispelling her hung-up woes. Light brightens her world on the sublime closer “Lie Down..” in which she questions whether we remain in the memories of those we leave behind—Gray veils her existentialism under a euphoric, swaying groove. It’s the epitome of her foundations taking a refined shape, with the hook “I can make your dust turn to sparkle / Can do a lot for you if you take a chance” borrowed from QWERTY’s “PREYING MANTIS !” once lyrical padding, transformed into a mantra capturing SAYA’s bittersweet essence.
Gray is an artist who feeds on reinvention. She’s perpetually self-examining, occasionally to the detriment of her musical individuality. Given Gray has sewn much of her earlier artistic fabric into this glowing tapestry, perhaps grander transformative newness is yet to come. Even so, it’s nice to hear that her rough sketches now have a lavish home.
Label: Dirty Hit
Year: 2025
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