MAITA’s Maria Maita-Keppler takes us track-by-track through her band’s unfiltered, uncompromising, and unapologetic third album ‘want’ – an intimate, invigorating, and all-consuming indie rock record that boldly embraces desire, unpacking what it means to follow your heart, trust your gut, and act in your own self-interest.

for fans of boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy

Stream: “i used to feel different” – MAITA

If the album is about want, and it’s about desire, it’s also about being in a place where you’re like, ‘Yes, I am going to try to get what I want and do what I want. And I’m going to do it for me.’

What happens when the life you have is no longer the life you want?

That kind of friction can consume us whole. Inner tension can turn volatile in a moment’s notice; we’ve all been there in some degree, and we all know what it’s like to have that raw, visceral energy bubbling inside you, just below the surface, threatening to find its way out on its own terms.

MAITA’s third album harnesses that energy, channeling it into a sonically and emotionally charged twelve-track reckoning as the band emphatically embrace desire, unpacking what it means to follow your heart and act in your own self-interest. Unfiltered, uncompromising, and unapologetic, want is an intimate, invigorating, and all-consuming indie rock record that hits hard and leaves a lasting mark.

once i was easy now i keep the beat
i used to feel different about these kinds of things

there’s a part of each day when i long to be home again
dead ends on slow streets a field where i lost a friend
i dreamed of a desert, the sage and the promise
a kind arm around me, first fever of longing

and i wrote of a lifetime on roads
long abandoned spraying out
stop signs with powder-blue candor
i molded a love like a god out of plaster
tragic pulled taut, and born of disaster

once i was a writer, now i cannot speak
i used to feel different about these kinds of things

– “i used to be different,” MAITA

Released July 26, 2024 via Fluff and Gravy Records, want is a spectacular show of force from Portland, Oregon’s MAITA. Since its debut in 2017, the indie rock project of Maria Maita-Keppler has emerged as a vessel of raw emotion and feverish, focused sound. Atwood Magazine previously praised the band’s sophomore LP I Just Want to be Wild for You (released in 2022 via Kill Rock Stars) as a “standout indie rock album full of wondrous color, heart, pure passion, and charisma,” and while these same words could apply to their third album, want feels decidedly bigger, bolder, more nuanced, and more ambitious than anything the band has made before. Much of the record was conceived in a state of emotional turmoil, with Maita-Keppler’s lyrics focused on desire within the framework of a long-term relationship.

The ultimate goal may be “wanting without guilt,” but as the artist also readily acknowledges, “Sometimes just being true to your own desires means not everyone is happy.” This album charts her journey to tough conclusions – one that traverses a painful wilderness many bruised hearts and souls will surely find familiar.

“I began writing the songs on this record during the pandemic, when every day was empty and the same. It actually allowed a blank space in which past memories could run wild, and tensions could simmer to the surface,” Maria Maita-Keppler tells Atwood Magazine. “As the songs began to take shape, I noticed that many of them circled the concept of desire within the context of a long-term relationship. I feel like there are so many songs about new relationships, or break-ups, and few that try to navigate the complexities that arise throughout the course of something that spans years. It felt like an exciting concept to zero in on.”

“This record seemed more intense to me from the beginning,” she continues. “I felt more courageous with my writing both lyrically and melodically. After recording two full band records, I had a more crystallized idea of our sonic palette, and knew that the album’s sound would reflect the intensity of the subject matter. The recording process went really smoothly, and my band mates Matthew Zeltzer, Nevada Sowle, and Cooper Trail really understood and captured the essence of each song.”

“As is the case with every MAITA record, there are really soft folk-centric moments and loud rock moments, and a lot in between. Matthew Thomson, who also plays in the project, engineered the basics of the record and mixed it, making the entire process an inside job; everyone involved had seen the progression of the project over the years and understood the assignment.”

Maita-Keppler describes want as a passionate, subtle, and potent record.

The album’s title captures one of its key themes: “Every song on the record contains ‘want’ as a lyric,” she explains. “I spend a lot of time trying to ascertain the needs of others, and sometimes have a hard time understanding my own desires. This record attempts to get to the core of what desire itself really looks like – it’s just the title ‘desire’ was already taken.”

want shares plenty of throughlines with its predecessors (2022’s sophomore LP I Just Want to Be Wild for You and 2020’s debut Best Wishes), but there’s no mistaking the maturity of the project, now in its seventh year.

“Per usual we have a lot of dynamics, and try not to subscribe to a single ‘sound’ across the entire album,” Maita-Keppler reflects. “We’ve always tried to serve each song individually when recording and producing. To me want is more focused than the last two, more thematically cohesive. I think we’ve naturally become more confident in our sound and what we’re trying to do.”

From its bold and brash opener “girl at the bar” to the impassioned, emotionally charged finale “i don’t want to kill you,” want proves something of a controlled chaos, with MAITA’s raw energy unleashed in wave after wave of carefully crafted, undeniably raw eruptions, intimate upheavals, and candid confessionals. Highlights within the record include everything from the moody, brooding “break up song x3” – which, true to its name, aches, aches, and aches some more – to the volatile fever dream “hotel,” the stripped-down and vulnerable “almost nothing, keeps me alive,” the lush, brooding “waking up at night,” the grungy, dramatic “violet dream,” and the anthemic, buoyant, pop-adjacent tempest, “i used to feel different.” Every song feels purposeful, deliberate, and intentional as MAITA strike a powerful balance between the record’s ‘concept’ of emotional friction and the innate desire to craft a cohesive, cathartic listening experience.

“Different songs resonate at different times, but I’m pretty attached to ‘girl at the bar,’ Maita-Keppler says on the topic of her own personal favorites. “I love the tension of the build in the middle, love that the song never returns to the same section twice. It’s a journey that goes through so many phases, and it also features on of the only lead guitar lines I’ve written which I consider a personal highlight. It was an extremely cathartic song to write and sometimes I have a hard time making it through it live because the adrenaline of performing it gets to me.”

When it comes to lyrical standouts, she finds it more challenging to choose just one line or song. “This answer changes the more I play the songs… I love this couplet from ‘waking up at night’ because it’s so simple and yet really captures those low mental health moments for me: ‘Wish that I felt smart again. Can’t make any art again.’ But I also love dancing around a subject with more words, the sort of lyrics gymnastics that I used to do a lot more in my songwriting such as I do in ‘i used to feel different”: ‘i wrote of a lifetime on roads long abandoned / spraying out stop signs with powder-blue candor / I molded a love like a god out of plaster  / tragic pulled taut, and born of disaster.’”

If want was, as Maita-Keppler says, born out of desire, then it was also born out of tension.

So much of the album’s emotional turmoil and sonic volatility comes from irreconcilable feelings and dialogues the artist is having within herself – and while there’s never going to be one song or story that sums it all up neatly, perhaps this line, pulled from the end of the heated tenth track “happy with you,” speaks to some of these greater, universal fragmentations: “I want to want to be happy with you.”

These are by no means easy things to talk about, but those words that go unspoken are often the most important ones to say aloud. MAITA have done all that and more in this album, giving voice to all those things that might otherwise go unsaid – and reminding us, intentionally or otherwise, that we’re not alone in our grief, in our heartache, and in our tension and turbulence.

“I hope listeners will find in want an outlet for their own hidden or unacknowledged feelings, or a companion for their own catharsis,” Maita-Keppler shares. “I hope that it allows people to feel the depths of their own emotions in a new way and that perhaps it can inspire some boldness in others the way it coaxed it out of me.”

Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside MAITA’s want with Atwood Magazine as Maria Maita-Keppler goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of her band’s third studio album!

want is out now via Fluff & Gravy Records.

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:: stream/purchase want here ::

:: connect with MAITA here ::

Stream: ‘want’ – MAITA

:: Inside want ::

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girl at the bar

This song careens through painful memories within a relationship, a vulnerable offering of peace that soon speeds into a mess of anger, insecurity, and of course, desire. I tore my self and my past apart. I zeroed in on the feeling of wanting to become somebody else to appeal more to my partner, the doubt I felt when I wondered if I the safe option, competing with the undeniable allure of a stranger.

break up song x3

This song chronicles three break-ups from the early days of a single relationship. Each break leaves me reaching: I want to be wanted, I want to give my partner what he wants. Each time he pulls away this desire becomes stronger, turning into an anxious state that clouds my ability to understand what it is that I actually want in the end.

cold light

Cold light explores patterns of depression and anxiety, the creeping of a coolness into places that should be warm and easy. This ‘cold light’ feels all the more invasive under the duress of trying to mask those feelings and shake them off.

ellipsis

This is a spontaneous instrumental piece that we made in the studio as an introduction to “at a bad time.” We played the improvisation 3 times and our engineer Matt Thomson layered them on top of one another and we left it as is.

at a bad time

This song explores the early stages of a relationship from the perspective of the person who is distant and unavailable. The narrator is keenly aware of their own inability to be present for the person, whom they feel deserves more than they can offer.

waking up at night again

Another song that tackles mental health. It was inspired by the salve of self improvement and self medication that we use to get us through the cycles of depression, which always return, hence the thread of ‘again’ that runs through the lyrics. Sometimes all you can do is research every vitamin, tackle every deficiency, gain control of some aspect of your life that perhaps might be improved upon.

hotel

I wrote this song partially in a hotel in California. The room felt so vapid and impersonal, but implied within its anonymity was the opportunity for the unfettered exploration of desire. I watched the business folk file in and out of the hotel in the mornings, in the evenings, temporarily freed from their own worlds. I imagined someone who perhaps couldn’t voice their own truest desires, whether they be emotional or sexual, and the ways in which perhaps they could only allow themselves the pleasure of those desires within the blank slate of a hotel room.

i used to feel different 

These days I so often feel weighed down, be it by the state of the world, the state of my mental health, or that of my loved ones around me. This song finds me wistful for a different time, a reminder of the creativity and magic that I imbued with my life when I was younger.

violet dream

Written in the middle of the pandemic, perhaps when the confines of a small house and a long term relationship have begun to feel stale. It tries to churn up desire by way of ‘ugliness,’ which is in this case can refer to any number of things, from our messiest sexual desires, to our flawed pasts, to our ability to let go of our tidy inhibitions and let the rawest parts of ourselves show through.

almost nothing, keeps me alive

A tender look at a similar theme, the point when you cease to be able to see your partner as an individual person because you are so close to them, your lives are so enmeshed. It also attempts to create that distance again, toying with the notion of exploration outside of a relationship to bring the picture into focus.

happy with you

The non-linear nature of anger. The way that painful events in the beginning of a relationship can permeate through it long after those events have passed, long after they should be forgiven. Sometimes it feels like no matter how much trust and healing is built into a partnership, a time or a place can trigger a response in the brain or in the body and the anger returns, perhaps unfairly.

i don’t wanna kill you

In some ways the path of anger feels the most simple: if you must hurt your partner, it is easer to do it in the name of balancing a scale, rather than taking responsibility for what it is you are actually asking for. In this song, the desire to stretch the limits of a relationship gets confused with the desire for retribution for past wrongs. I alternate between heightened, vindictive verses, and tender, open choruses in which I realize I don’t want to hurt my partner, that I must leave behind the wounds of the past if I’m to move onwards and into the complex unknown of the future.

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:: stream/purchase want here ::

:: connect with MAITA here ::

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 © Tristan Paiige

want

an album by MAITA