From witch therapy to musical mantras, Maya Hawke’s ‘Chaos Angel’ is a journey of self-discovery, breaking patterns, and learning in front of everyone.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Andrew Lyman.

As a child, Maya Hawke paid a visit to a witch therapist, who was supposed to help her work through some early depression. The series of sessions concluded with a self-actualisation ceremony that set out to remove the shield that had hardened across young Maya's chest and then replace it with a golden bubble.

"Just to be clear, I'm not entirely that woo-woo," says Maya. "It was an experiment to see how to make a kid not depressed. It was a lot of talking and mythologising, and you're talking to your spirit animals and your spiritual guides. It was really quite intense, actually."

The hour-long session was recorded, the audio of which was unearthed to be used on Maya's second album, 2022's 'Moss', but she couldn't find a place for it. It did, however, sit perfectly at the start of her upcoming third album 'Chaos Angel'.

"I knew that this record was going to be called 'Chaos Angel' from the time we started recording it, and I was listening back through the audio of the witch therapy session, and I found her say, 'You become an angel in human form, does that make sense?' I was like, oh, that's how I'm gonna open my record. And there's a little voice that goes, 'Yes'. That's me as a little tiny kid."

It opens 'Black Ice', the delicate folk number that encapsulates much of 'Chaos Angel''s ethos. While the start draws directly from her past, it winds up firmly in her present, where, inspired by the 'Wise Up' scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, her various close friends repeat "Give up, be loved" to close it. Its central lyric pulls from an old Hawke family expression – "Why do it right when you can do it yourself?" – bringing in her mission statement for the album, that of learning to break out of your usual patterns.

"I wanted to make a record really intentionally, and rather than it being one random, full throttle gush of a particular emotion, to zero in on a lot of different kinds of relationships and point out the weak spots in them, or the mistakes that I felt that I've made. In order to carry myself through that with a little bit of a narrative structure, I created this myth of the Chaos Angel, which was kind of reverse-engineered from the song, which is the final track on the record, of this Amelia Bedelia-esque guardian angel, who was always coming around trying to do the right thing, trying to be the angel of love and ends up screwing everything up."

That theme of recognising your own mistakes and patterns is cleverly represented sonically, with literal repetition throughout the record. From "Give up, be loved" in the opener, through the self-soothing "If you're okay, then I'm okay" that forms most of the middle track 'Okay', to the title-track at the end, which picks up on her most prominently destructive pattern, breaking it as the song goes on and switching around the order of "I want you, I love you, I promise, I'm sorry" as it swirls out.