Maiya Blaney Creates a Fascinating, Densely Woven Tapestry » PopMatters

Brooklyn’s Maiya Blaney explores her darkness with a fascinating blend of drum ‘n’ bass, folk-infused R&B vocals, and metal guitars.

A Room With a Door That Closes Maiya Blaney Lex 13 June 2025

For artists, your room is everything. As Brian Wilson so poignantly puts it on the ethereal “In My Room”, “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to / In my room / In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears / In my room.” It’s even more critical for women, who are often buffeted by life’s demands, pushed and pulled by endless expectations to be everything to everybody. As Virginia Woolf so famously put it in A Room of One’s Own, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Having your own room gives you the freedom to truly be yourself, or even discover who that is in the first place.

Maiya Blaney’s A Room With a Door That Closes was born from a similar state of self-exploration. With a background predominantly as a vocalist, Blaney started learning not just how to play guitar but also how to produce her music when she first started working on her follow-up to 2021’s 3. Given the ambitious scope of each song’s sprawling, imaginative structure and the sheer jaw-dropping eclecticism of the project, it’s unthinkable that Blaney’s only been producing and playing guitar for a couple of years. What could have easily ended up as a hot mess instead becomes a fascinating, densely woven tapestry that explores the many different shades and hues of darkness. 

According to Blaney, A Room With a Door That Closes is “a love letter to her blue”, an emotional state that she defines as “a kinetic, intense, and dark energy that needs to be expressed as soon as it is felt.” Anyone intimately familiar with the darker shades of life and the human experience knows it’s beyond reductive to label such feelings as something so simple as “sad”, “disappointed”, or even “heartbroken”. Like the color blue, there are many different shades of sadness. It’s only fitting that Blaney adopts such an eclectic palette to explore the nocturnal side of life. 

Things start vaguely uncertain and unsteady with the woozy, melted tape jazz of “I’ll Be With You” before exploding into a shrapnel storm of white hot jungle beats, while a simple synth line seesaws complacently. She moves back into neo-soul/R&B territory for “Left”, with its broken organ chords, but the aimlessness and complacency end there.

By the time “Carmen Electra” rolls around with its burring damaged noise electronics, plodding bassline, and doom metal guitars, Blaney is pissed, with a Valkyrie yowl that would turn a black metalhead’s hair white. Should she ever get tired of neo-soul, Blaney could have a bright future ahead of her in post-hardcore. 

That’s what’s so incredible about A Room With a Door That Closes. Generally, when someone attempts to blend punk rock, heavy metal, and electronic music, the result is often spectacular failure. It’s not even a great shock; some of these styles have wildly different demands. Punk tends to require a combustible spirit and a two-fingers-up disregard for the rules, while metal usually requires at least some technical mastery. Electronic music demands a temperament closer to an electrical technician or civil planner than the sweaty abandon of circle pits and spilled beer.

Yet it all makes sense on A Room With a Door That Closes. You never get the sense that Blaney is trying on musical costumes or playing tourist. That is who she is. Thank all that’s holy, she had the time and space to find out herself.