Don’t count the stars, they are not real
Made them myself with glue and steel
I drape the tarp you call your sky
I poke the holes with needle eye
The stars seem reassuring—until someone admits they put them there. Behind the constellations are wire, glue, and a person trying to make the dark more bearable. Art offers this curious arrangement: one person builds a small, convincing shelter; another gets to rest beneath it. And the one holding the needle may still be struggling to breathe.
New York songwriter mayva follows that uneasy exchange through turpentine, the second single from her forthcoming debut album, the most difficult flower. Released November 4 and co-produced with Ethan Williams of Brooklyn’s Shower Curtain, it is, in her words, “a love letter to the strange devotion of making things.” That devotion has its costs. “Bedazzling my lungs / to make the breathing bearable” turns decoration into a desperate repair job, while each new discovery leaves her knowing less about herself. The work changes the person who began it.
For its accompanying video, premiering here, mayva takes that idea to the worktable. She directs and co-edits with cinematographer Yuri Bong, filling the film with handmade costumes, props, masks, and claymation. We move from a cramped workspace to a miniature bedroom with a tiny radiator, curtained window, and elaborate dressing table, then out to a parking lot where a huge, rust-brown creature makes the asphalt feel like the outskirts of an enchanted forest. Scale keeps shifting, and familiar objects acquire unexpected company. You can almost feel the materials between your fingers.
The video’s fondness for odd creatures and physical invention calls up that extraordinary ’80s run of dark fantasy: The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Legend, The NeverEnding Story, Return to Oz, Dragonslayer, The Company of Wolves, and Time Bandits. Around them sit the cursed romance of Ladyhawke, the Arthurian excess of Excalibur, the creatures of Willow and Clash of the Titans, and the animated enchantments of The Secret of NIMH, The Black Cauldron, and The Last Unicorn. Beauty and danger shared the same room; a marvelous escape could come with something capable of biting.
Another particularly apt relative is Alice, the 1988 surrealist dark fantasy film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. His collision of live action and stop-motion animation gives ordinary objects a disobedient, sometimes threatening life. mayva’s little rooms and animated figures invite a similar attention to the things themselves: their surfaces, their proportions, the oddness of watching something made by hand begin to move. The small irregularities encourage you to look closer, keeping the human effort visible inside the illusion.
Eventually, the film carries that strangeness onto a small stage dressed for “Night Under the Stars,” where tinsel brushes the effects pedals and masked musicians look ready for a school dance with an unusually permissive admissions policy. Williams appears as the ogre, Grace Goss plays the snail, and Poncho plays Poncho. There are prom photographs, blue-lit faces, and a homemade sky hanging over the band. Those stars bring the lyrics’ reassurance into view: someone has taken the trouble to build a place where these creatures can belong.
Guitars swoop and saw through turpentine, setting mayva’s gently sung melody against the weight of early-’90s indie rock. The Sundays and Mazzy Star come to mind in the sweetness and unhurried phrasing, while the heavier passages recall Sonic Youth in their late-’80s and early-’90s balance of melody and abrasion. As the mix grows denser, the song moves further into shoegaze, with each thickening layer adding pressure around the voice.
Around two minutes and twenty seconds in, a pared-down kick-drum pattern and blunt guitar thumps open space for a more spoken-sung delivery. The shift puts the words closer to the listener, as though mayva has stepped away from the band to explain how she built the ceiling. When the guitars cloud over again, their blurred sweetness recalls My Bloody Valentine before Loveless.
Watch the video for turpentine below:
After five years performing with New York’s all-girl rock band Homade, mayva brings her poetry-led songwriting into a solo debut spanning shoegaze, dream pop, and grunge. Co-produced with Williams, the nine-song the most difficult flower begins with a winter storm and follows its aftereffects through destruction and renewal. The album is due January 15, 2027.
mayva will headline an album release show at Elsewhere Zone One in Brooklyn, New York, on January 14, 2027, the evening before the record’s arrival. Tickets are available here.
Listen to turpentine below and order the single here.
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Earlier releases as Maya Ruth:
