“It’s funny because I went into this new album being like, ‘I’m going to do the opposite of a concept album.’ There was supposed to be no concept; that was the concept. I couldn’t get away from it, apparently.”
It’s an intriguing conundrum for Margaret Sohn, whose Miss Grit project has always been strongly bound to a conceptual identity. Ever since they first captured ears with their earlier EPs, 2019’s Talk Talk and 2021’s Impostor, the Korean-American artist has meticulously pushed forward their use of eruptive guitars, mechanical synths, and their yearning voice coalescing into a singular navigation of identity and love.
Before their latest record, Under My Umbrella, Sohn’s intersection of music and concept was at its most accomplished on its predecessor, 2023’s Follow the Cyborg. The art-pop record was inspired by sci-fi films and critical literature, with Sohn adopting the role of a cyborg to relieve themselves of flaws stemming from racialized and gendered societal expectations, ultimately to live more freely and in solace. It’s hard and soft—Sohn’s delicate falsetto wonderfully accompanies the bubbling, anthemic riffs that rise from their intense thinking. Entirely self-produced, Follow the Cyborg’s insularity is remarkable, but cracks began to form in their cybernetic exterior.
“The last record became a less relatable feeling to me, and maybe that contributed to live performances where I wasn’t necessarily feeling what I wanted to feel while playing them,” Sohn says. “I listened to a lot of music with pretty emotional lyrics and vulnerable songwriting, so I was feeling envious of seeing those artists being able to perform and express themselves that way.”
The desire to reflect vulnerably catalyzed Under My Umbrella as the ideal time to power down the machinery and find a better way to self-actualize in the studio and on stage. Following that release, Sohn also faced some of the most grueling relationship crises they’d ever experienced in terms of romance and friendship.
“That probably inevitably helped that along as well,” Sohn notes. “I wasn’t necessarily writing about a feeling or situation that was present with me at the time.”
After all, the cybernetic exterior that Sohn clung to is part human—that fallible yet vital element wasn’t given the focus it needed, as Sohn shared their readiness to move past it when Follow the Cyborg was unveiled to the world. “I think I was maybe overthinking things too much,” Sohn says. “I felt really related to [the cyborg persona] at that moment, but I couldn’t necessarily put into words what my feelings were or what I was going through. I was hoping to be more metaphorical, not so direct.”
Now, Sohn shares an unguarded view of themselves, the person once metaphorically protected by this artificial casing, through their newly urgent music and non-metaphorical words that mark new territory for Miss Grit’s sonic world. “I really wanted to do a specific energy shift from the last record. I was playing a lot of live shows at the time, and I think I felt a bit restrained,” Sohn explains. “I wanted to capture something, not with a higher energy necessarily, but different from the last record—something more fun to play live for myself.”
Even if Sohn thinks otherwise, the stormy opener “Tourist Mind” is a novel, energetic racket unlike anything else under the Miss Grit name. On it, swelling strings collide with maximalist synths and thumping kicks, that imperative fervor prolonged in the subsequent “Mind Disaster,” which is driven by a jittering, rave-like pulse. These singles suggest a broadly intense atmosphere, but the album is largely the opposite, carrying an intimate, dream-pop sensibility.
“I actually went into it trying to make a pretty minimalistic album in terms of the instrumental,” Sohn reveals. “Obviously, it changes when you’re writing it. Maybe I was just able to embrace the maximalist stuff it has in there. There’s less peeling back or restraining.”
Sohn actively avoided self-editing every recorded take to preserve the music’s authenticity and not overthink their writing—another byproduct of embracing human qualities. “There’s one or two songs where the guitar take was the first I did for the recording, and then it made it onto the record,” Sohn shares. “I was trying to be mindful of how much I was editing myself because I have the tendency to overdo it.”
Sohn adds, “I guess the concept of this record is to allow people to stand under my umbrella with me.”
In a first for Sohn, they’d invited many of their friends into their musical fold to add their multidisciplinary flourishes to Miss Grit and help move the songs along, including members of Catcher, Margaux, Momma, Mui Zyu, and mmph. For someone empowered by solitude (on “Tourist Mind,” Sohn repeats the lyric “I’ve never wanted to be so alone”), it’s a dichotomy that might seem potentially at odds with their creative process. Yet it proved to be so much more fulfilling than stifling: “I was mindful of when I would tap the person to see if they could add something on. I was trying to do that earlier in the process before trying to really work things out all on my own, but then I would run into these roadblocks, and probably during those moments I should have reached out to people.”
One song emblematic of Sohn’s enriching openness is the pacifying, downtempo “Where Is My Head?” with the double lyric “You’ll never see inside of me / You’re all so free” succinctly expressing Sohn’s healing transformation upon shutting down the cyborg. Placed in the middle of the tracklist, it’s the centerpiece of Under My Umbrella, but it was astonishingly written a year and a half before the rest of the record. “It was separate in this weird way,” Sohn says. “I also think it was the template for the mood I wanted to make, like a throughline.”
That continuity presents itself on the bittersweet closer “Waste Me,” a crushing, trip-hop pop song indebted to the genre’s vocal-forward pioneers in the ‘90s, and a rumination on waning confidence in genuine self-expression after being misunderstood: “Everyone feels wasted / And they’re longing to exist.” It’s the one dearest to Sohn for bringing out the “most vivid memories” they felt while writing it, and for fulfilling their goal to “capture that specific feeling [they] personally had.” If we return to the powering down of their cyborg persona one more time, even without Sohn’s assertion, there’s a tangible sense of relief from them letting go of overprotecting their true feelings.
Sohn’s evolution shows their continued commitment to developing their artistic practice of “getting a certain idea across,” but landing on the most emotional and expansive Miss Grit release yet is an achievement that Sohn feels their past self would be “very proud of.”
“Maybe I would be envious because that’s what I was trying to do more of on the first record,” Sohn then quips. “But I think I’d just be very happy with how things ended up.”
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