mxmtoon Made Her Early Percussion With a Hair Straightener
The percussion on the earliest mxmtoon recordings was made with whatever was within reach of the desk, including a hair straightener. The rest was GarageBand, a ukulele and the guest bedroom of her parents’ house in Oakland. She was seventeen, the name came from her initials, and for a while she did not tell her family it was happening.
That is bedroom pop in the literal sense rather than as a genre tag, and it matters to how the rest of the career reads. Maia has since made three albums, the most recent being Liminal Space, released on 1 November 2024 through AWAL. The equipment changed. The instinct about who is allowed in the room did not.
The Sound of Not Being Able to Afford Anything
Improvised percussion is usually described as charming after the fact, but it starts as a constraint. A hair straightener produces a short, bright, unpitched click, which is exactly what a quiet ukulele song needs and exactly what a drum kit in a suburban bedroom would ruin. The choice was practical before it was aesthetic.
What that produced was a recording style with almost no low end and a very close vocal, which happens to be ideal for headphones and for the platform she was releasing on. A generation of artists arrived at the same sound for the same reasons, and it became the defining texture of late-2010s online pop.
Three Albums, Three Different Records
The Masquerade arrived in September 2019, self-released. Rising followed in May 2022 through AWAL and went in an electronic, disco-leaning pop direction. Liminal Space then reversed that almost completely, moving toward mellow, intimate, country-inflected material that NARC Magazine described as folk pop with excellent production and a hugely dynamic range.
Between them sit a run of EPs that map the same restlessness: Plum Blossom in 2018, the paired Dawn and Dusk in 2020, a set written for the game Life Is Strange in 2021, and a revisited Plum Blossom in 2023. Seven years of output with no two consecutive releases in the same mode.
The Dawn and Dusk pairing is worth pausing on as a format decision. Releasing two short EPs a few months apart rather than one album is a way of keeping a body of work in two halves that can be heard against each other, and it suits a writer whose subject is usually a change of state. It also, practically, gives an artist twice as many release moments, which for someone whose audience came from a platform that rewards frequency is a sensible thing to notice.
Choosing Who Is in the Room
The most consequential decision on Liminal Space was about personnel. Maia assembled an all-female creative team, and her reasoning was practical rather than declarative: “There was such a through line with all of these songs around my experiences in my life as they relate to gender.” She wanted people who would understand what she meant without her having to explain herself first.
Anyone who has worked on something personal will recognise the calculation. The cost of explaining a fundamental experience to a collaborator before you can begin is paid in the work, and it is usually paid by making the work vaguer. Removing that step is a production decision as much as a political one.
What the Title Refers To
Liminality arrived first as a visual idea, and she has said the imagery was driving the storytelling toward cyclical things. The album’s emotional centre is her mother’s cancer diagnosis and the way a change of that size reorders a relationship between a mother and a daughter.
She has been careful about how she frames the making of it, describing the record as the eye of the storm and the writing sessions as some of the calmest moments of that period. That is a precise thing to say about creative work done during a family crisis, and it explains why the album is not heavy in the way the subject implies.
Blunt Lyricism and Redwood Trees
The writing is direct rather than oblique. She has described practising more radical honesty than on previous records while arguing for the freedom to explore darker material. One line she has singled out runs “I’m feeling pretty small among the redwood trees / I want to count the rings deep inside of me”, written out of the feeling of being dwarfed by your surroundings.
NARC’s review picked up the same quality, praising blunt lyricism alongside playful humour and fascinating detail, and noting that the songs stay memorable despite darker subject matter than her earlier work. Dork gave it four out of five and called it a significant step forward.
The Guest Who Made Sense
The Situation features Kero Kero Bonito, and Maia has explained the choice in terms that fit the rest of the record: the song’s subject, ageing and the way a woman’s perceived value is treated as diminishing, is something she considers universal among women, and Sarah Midori Perry was one of the first mixed-race Asian women she saw occupying space in pop.
The other singles were I Hate Texas and Rain. Between them they cover the album’s range, from the flatly declarative to the atmospheric, which is roughly the distance the record travels.
On the Road and Then Off It
The Liminal Space tour opened in Nashville on 18 February 2025 and finished in Belfast on 29 April, a two-month run across North America and then Europe. That is a compact schedule by current standards, where a successful album routinely produces eighteen months of touring, and it is consistent with an artist who has been explicit about not wanting the release calendar to run her.
What she did next says something about where the writing is pointed. She recorded “I Fall In Love Too Easily” for the 2025 tribute album Chet Baker Re:imagined, a standard associated with a trumpeter whose singing voice was famously thin, close-miked and conversational. It is a natural fit for someone who built a career on a quiet vocal recorded a few inches from a laptop, and it is the clearest signal yet of where the country and folk textures on Liminal Space were heading.
She next plays Blue June Music Fest in Nashville on 20 June 2026. Nashville bookending the period, opening the tour and now hosting the festival appearance, is not a coincidence for a record that moved toward country instrumentation.
Refusing the Sprint
One further decision is worth recording because it runs against how the industry now operates. She insisted on finishing the whole album before anyone made plans for a release date or a tour, specifically so she would have time with the songs, including time to play them to her parents.
Release schedules are normally set before a record exists, which means the deadline shapes the work rather than the reverse. Declining that is the same kind of choice as picking collaborators who need no briefing, and it belongs alongside Cornelius deciding which four people to open his album to. Both are artists treating the question of who and when as part of the composition. In Maia’s case the habit goes back to a bedroom in Oakland, where nobody set a date and the percussion came off the desk.
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