Mariuk - Blue Days (2021)

Mariuca García-Lomas is best known as the vocalist in Northwest, the London-based experimental and artsy project I posted about almost three years ago. At the end of the last year, the Spanish artist released her solo album Blue Days and it's a real dose of ambient pop magic.

The story of this album is very inspiring. Back in 2020, García-Lomas made a public declaration to learn how to play guitar and prove it by releasing a single every month. This album consists of 12 tracks so the artist proved to be successful in her challenge. And although the songs are not recorded in brilliant quality, they create unique, very intimate atmosphere; nothing brings an artist to their audience so much as small mistakes and imperfections that have to be battled with. This resulted in an ambient pop and quite noisy album that makes me think of Grouper or Midwife but with some of Northwest's very artistic vibes.

When describing the process of creating this album, García-Lomas mentions how difficult 2020 was and how she faced existential crises and it's well visible on the release. It's no coincidence that the first song's title is literally Sad and the artist doesn't shy away from singing about the most traumatizing things ("How could you not feel sad?/I'm afraid of dying all the time" or the one of being Almost 30 (that's depressing, I'm already past that)). But this sadness gradually gives place to very much more hopeful tones with The World Is Yours as their pinnacle. It just shows that the album portrays more than just one evolution of the artist.

Blue Days costs 3 EUR.

Northwest - II (2019)

Check: Hunger

Country: Spain/UK

Genre: noisy ambient pop

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