Chloe Moriondo opens up about the heartbreak, healing, and hard-won self-discovery of her transformative third album ‘oyster,’ a shimmering synth-pop journey through grief, growth, and the ocean’s depths.

Stream: ‘oyster’ – Chloe Moriondo

In a world where artists are expected to cultivate a social media presence to go along with their music, it could be argued that Chloe Moriondo put the cart before the horse.

Amassing roughly three million subscribers on YouTube through her covers and occasional updates, she has been showing the world who she is for over a decade. Now, her third album, oyster, shows everyone how she returned to herself in the face of grief, which is made all the more impactful coming from someone we have watched grow up.

The past few years have not been kind to Moriondo, which she lets us know nearly right away. After releasing SUCKERPUNCH, which marked a complete departure from the indie rock sound many listeners had become accustomed to, the musician “went through a pretty intense breakup – the biggest one I’ve ever gone through,” she says.

It’s as good an explanation as any as to why oyster feels so tender, so intimate for a bouncy, synth-pop record.  “I felt so lost and alone and almost didn’t feel like I knew myself,” she adds. “It was like I had to figure out who I was again.” 

For that process to take place, she had to go to the ocean. This is the setting of oyster, Moriondo’s third album that straddles the line between catchy pop hits and velvety ballads. The new record opens up with “catch,” a bubbly, glimmering song all about chasing after the person you’re interested in.

From the very first second, it’s clear Moriondo is taking this oceanic theme the whole way. Heavily reverbed synths flood your ears as you sink to the sea floor with her. The wanting of it all is quite infectious, despite her outlining the rougher parts of crushing. Just as you gear up for more sweet, fizzy love songs, she rips the rug right out from under for “raw,” an equally poppy and propulsive track that lets the listener know where her head is really at (for the record, it’s vulnerable).

A change in outlook typically means a change in sound, and oyster is no exception to this.

Gone are the taunting personas used on SUCKERPUNCH, and equally absent is the adolescent indie rock sound from Blood Bunny, or even earlier on Rabbit Hearted. What remains lies somewhere in the middle, greeting us with a palpable sense of maturity and a dreamy, danceable landscape. The lead single, “shoreline,” is a gleaming example of this: humming drones act as a throughline amidst simplistic, unshielded lyrics. 

One could even argue the thesis of the record lies in this song when she says “I miss you, I’m bitter, but not all the time.” The album is at its best when Moriondo embraces her contradictions. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for her, this is most of what healing from heartbreak is. “hate it” rides the same line of resentment and desire, with Moriondo singing, “Everybody wants you, and I hate it, but I can’t let you go.” The same can be said for “use,” wherein the chorus goes, “I use and let use, I do, just like you.” She can’t demonize her ex-lover too much, because doing so causes self-reflection on the more negative ways she’s coping.

There’s no easy way to grieve a breakup, which Chloe Moriondo knows as well as anyone.

She lends us a front-row seat to watch her falter, fall, and get back up over and over again. oyster is such a strong step forward for her as an artist because of the steps she took in her personal growth; these songs are not just a reinvention of her sound but who she is as a person in the aftermath of everything.

If this is what the most authentic version of Chloe Moriondo sounds like, we better stick around to hear what’s next.

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:: stream/purchase oyster here ::

:: connect with Chloe Moriondo here ::

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A CONVERSATION WITH CHLOE MORIONDO

Chloe Moriondo: Thank you so much. I’m super proud of this album. It means the entire world to me, so, hearing others see it in the same light makes me feel really fulfilled and excited. I feel like on each album, you can hear how long it’s been since the last record, and this one definitely feels like a more mature album that is like a culmination of everything that I’ve made previously. 

Chloe Moriondo: The isolation period that I went through post-breakup and post-tour, on this little hiatus that I was on until I started writing music, really inspired me. I was very visually inspired by the bottom of the sea. I remember I watched a very short animation of a little mermaid or siren-like creature looking very forlorn and sad, going from the surface, swimming to the bottom, and curling up in a little ball. I was really inspired by that and any imagery that symbolizes loneliness and reflection. It just fits so well with the ocean.

Chloe Moriondo: I’ve been more hands-on and in charge of the creative direction of this album than I’ve ever been before, which is really important to me and has been fun and exciting. There’s been a lot of challenges with independence, knowing what I like, and knowing what I want to write about. Finding those words in a way that I want to sing them has all been different. It used to come easier, I think, because I was going through different things. I was a kid and I didn’t think about it in the same way. Now, I think I’ve challenged myself to write in different and more reflective ways than I used to.

Chloe Moriondo: For different reasons, I would say “use” and “hate it.” Lyrically, I feel like I challenged myself and was challenged by the songwriters I was working with for that. But they’re obviously two very different songs. 

Chloe Moriondo: Exactly! I feel like “hate it” is the cousin of “Body Bag,” and we didn’t even really realize it until it was finished.

Chloe Moriondo: There weren’t too many obvious references or immediate things I was pulling up when I came into the session. I have a little playlist, like an oyster playlist that has some, like, one-offs. I was listening to a lot of Shygirl and Owl City. I was listening to a little bit of James Blake, and a lot of Mid-Air Thief, too. I was very inspired by Candy Claws and a bunch of random artists that I like listening to already. I was enjoying being inspired by it all at the time, and it probably fused its way into my stuff, but it was less obvious.

I was focusing more on getting out the feelings and the energy and creating. I’d go into the studio and just be like, “I wanna make a happy dance song today. I’m tired of making sad stuff, dance song today!” And then the next day I’d be like, “I wanna make like a song that’s like the Jellyfish Jam from SpongeBob, but if it was sexy.” I kind of just followed my arrow on this one. 

Chloe Moriondo: I just wanted to make sure that I included the correct amount of vulnerability and reflectiveness. I do want to show that I was sad as hell for a while for this past, like, two years, but the fun did not leave me, and it’s never going to leave. I’m never gonna stop writing fun songs, I can’t do that.

Chloe Moriondo: I think I’ve become more comfortable with writing with other people and opening myself up to bouncing, back-and-forth collaboration, rather than just writing a verse and sticking with it without allowing any feedback. My songwriting has matured a little bit. When I reflect on my writing on Blood Bunny or my writing and SUCKERPUNCH, I think I was intentionally immature and, in some ways, fresher. But when I think about how I wrote when I was 19 compared to now, I’ve just naturally gotten a little bit more reflective, a little bit more mature just in my word choices, and also, hopefully, just a little bit better. That’s always the goal.

Chloe Moriondo: My immediate thought was “raw.” “raw” is my sweet little angel and I don’t regret a single word I wrote on that song. I mean, I don’t on any of the album, but that one especially just feels very true to me, and I think it’ll continue to feel true to me for a long time. I also think a song like “siren calling” also feels very personal and true to me as well in a different way. “use,” too. Those are the ones closest to my chest, I feel like.

Chloe Moriondo: I’m hoping that people hear their favorite parts of the type of music that I make in every song. I hope that if people have listened to my music before and enjoyed Blood Bunny, that they hear those elements in this album, because I definitely felt them, and I hope that people really like SUCKERPUNCH that they really feel that in this album, too, because I felt that as well. I want people to just be inspired and excited, to think about the ocean and somewhere exciting that they wanna go next.

Chloe Moriondo: Every album and project of mine is going to be a little bit immature in some ways, but I think for this one, it’s a fresher, different kind that feels more like I’m connecting to a younger part of myself rather than reaching out to connect with other people. 

Chloe Moriondo: I’d tell myself to keep leaning into every feeling that I’m feeling, the bad ones and insane infatuations and the depressions, all of it, even the intensity of which I felt all of those emotions and sudden crushes and going, “I’m sad again about my break up and I have a crush again and I’m sad again!” All of that whirlwind was very important to the creation of this album and to me finding more of myself. I would tell her to keep feeling it.

Chloe Moriondo: When I first started writing this album, I initially envisioned a concept album that was also a story album, because I find those types of projects so fascinating and very admirable. I think artists who can write a novel with their albums are just superhuman, and it’s crazy! I wanted to try my take at that at first, but then I think it just became like this world of imagery that I started building around the ocean and all of my feelings and the events that led to them for the past, like two years.

This album is definitely very me. The other ones were too, and I think SUCKERPUNCH was also, but definitely in like a “I’m trying out different sides of my personality and weird, crazy shit, cause luckily I was allowed to” way. I think being allowed to have fun and experiment is what leads me to make albums. I’m so proud of this one.

Chloe Moriondo: I do my best to throw myself into whatever I’m excited about, whatever I’m feeling, whatever I want to make, whatever I feel like it’s going to come out most passionately is what I’ve gone for. I’m very lucky that I’ve been pretty supported throughout all of it, and I want to keep making every genre of music, regardless of whether it’s expected or not. I think that’s what makes it even cooler.

Chloe Moriondo: I think I have always been a very… I hate using the word hot and cold because that sucks, like, being a hot and cold person, but in some instances, I am. No matter what my feelings are, they’re gonna be strong. Whether I’m angry, whether I’m obsessed, whether I’m hopelessly upset, it’s all going to be a lot. I think that shows up in my songwriting, especially on the ones like “Hate It,” where the conflicting feelings are so strong. I think I feel conflicted about most things in life.

Chloe Moriondo: It took a lot more tweaking and finding the balance between more acoustic sounds, live instrumentation-type sounds, and the very shiny robotic synthetic sounds that I have come to be so enamored with in the past handful of years. It was a lot of just sitting in the studio, trying out different ways we could outfit the song. We would write a song and then kind of sit and like go back and forth for a handful of days like, “What do we want to change about this to make it more cohesive with the album? What do we want to change about it to make it warm?” oyster is very acoustic, but has these underlying waves of little glitchy beeps and noises that I love so much and need to be there. I was a little bit particular about, for instance, how much guitar was in the album.

Just because I didn’t want to create another SUCKERPUNCH didn’t mean I wanted to create another Blood Bunny, either. Sometimes when you get into a studio, especially with a producer who you don’t know super well and doesn’t know you very well, they’re like, “Okay, so, what are we making?” I wanted to mix my favorite parts of both records, because those are my two babies, my two favorites that I wanted to match into one delicious, salty, scary, beautiful thing. This time, it was more about following my gut on what I liked to write and which sounds and words I liked best. It could have been more leading towards SUCKERPUCH or Blood Bunny, but it was something in the middle. I’m very happy with what we ended up with.

Chloe Moriondo: That movie one on “weak” was so fun. I was like, I remember walking in the studio for that one and being like, “I wanna sample something old,” and we just looked up old documentaries about love. I don’t remember exactly what the title was, but it was a puberty video from the ’80s or something. So, this girl is so excited about this double date that she’s going to go on. She goes and she tells her mom and she’s like, “Well, hold on. Let me show you some pictures.” It’s really a funny and sweet video, and I liked the way it sounded, so we took it. It kind of fits in the album, though, wanting to be vulnerable but being apprehensive.

Chloe Moriondo: You have to allow yourself some comfort in your shell: self-care, video games, eating good food, watching movies, et cetera. Also, make sure that you force yourself out of it. It’s actually fun to let yourself be vulnerable when it ends up going well and to have yourself do things you wouldn’t normally do. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone. It’s good to allow yourself both.

Chloe Moriondo: I’m so excited about everything that we’re gonna be doing, both off of this album and previous albums. We’re going to do our best to create a beautiful, immersive, exciting experience that will hopefully feel very personal for everyone. There’s going to be a really gorgeous balance between mostly oyster songs, because I can’t not have it.

There’s going to be some stuff from my other albums too, though, and for VIP, there’s even going to be some little ukulele throwbacks. It’s going to be sweet and exciting and very emotional. I had my little fingers on the music direction part of the show for the past couple of weeks and it’s been very exciting. It’s gonna be all-encompassing, and I can’t wait.

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:: stream/purchase oyster here ::

:: connect with Chloe Moriondo here ::

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“oyster” – Chloe Moriondo

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 © Madeline Kate Kann

oyster

an album by Chloe Moriondo