mxmtoon announces her headline gig on 29 April 2025 at Belfast's iconic Ulster Hall!
Over the years, the Oakland native and now Nashville-based artist’s unguarded self-expression has earned her a devoted global following, led to collaborations with the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Noah Kahan, and propelled her through an expansive career that’s also included hosting a podcast and authoring a pair of graphic novels. Now 24, mxmtoon found her relationship to songwriting profoundly transformed in the making of her third album liminal space, a body of work informed by a period of major upheaval and uncertainty in her family life. When met with a bigger and bolder sound threaded with elements of folk and indie-rock—achieved thanks to her all-female creative team —the result is an up-close exploration of what she sums up as “the messy, dark, complicated, and also very beautiful chaos inherent in mother-daughter relationships.”
The follow-up to rising—a 2022 LP praised by The Guardian as “the smart teen-movie soundtrack gen Z never had”—liminal space finds mxmtoon working with co-producers Carrie K (Noah Kahan, Suki Waterhouse) and Chloe Kraemer (The Japanese House, Wet Leg) and bringing a newfound sense of agency to the album’s creative direction.
Mainly recorded at Carrie’s home studio in Nashville, liminal space ultimately finds mxmtoon returning to the insular approach of her early work (including the many songs she self-recorded in her family’s guest room and posted to SoundCloud) while shaping each track with a newly heightened confidence and clarity of vision. “I remember being in a session for this record and wondering if I should ask my co-writer if the melody I’d just written was good enough—and then telling myself, ‘If it feels good, let’s just trust it and move on,’” she says. “Throughout the whole process, I was very conscious of allowing myself to sit with the songs and make sure that I loved them as they were, rather than showing them to other people right away and letting their opinions weigh too heavily against my own.”
By the time she’d completed her most emotionally intense and ambitious work to date, mxmtoon arrived at a more elevated perspective on the infinitely strange experience of making her way through the world. “For a while I wanted these songs to sound like I was resolved and had worked out the answers to everything, but eventually I realized I can’t expect that of myself,” says Maia. “I hope when people hear the album it helps them to see that understanding yourself is a never ending process, and that you deserve the time and space to be lost in it. It’s a little terrifying but it’s also really freeing, and I think those two things can absolutely exist together as one.”
