The Predatory Wasp
Maria BC’s third studio album Marathon lands at the end of the month, and Night & day is the second single: a haunting, reflective experimental folk song. The album itself is billed to deal with themes of “resistance, environmental ruin, personal disruptions and destruction”, which feels very 2026.
The first new music since the release of her excellent 2023 album Spike Field, Taper was written and recorded around two years ago, and is “about searching for someone who doesn’t want to be found and mourning a future foreclosed. grief and longing, basically…”. Bleak! And beautiful!
While Maria BC’s debut album Hyaline explored grief and anxiety through a series of character-led accounts, their follow-up Spike Field is more concerned with buried emotions and actions, positing that the past will continue to lurk below the surface until one decides to break through the soil and face what lies beneath. If that makes it sound bleakly gothic, then the music is anything but; it’s delicate, earthy and seemingly with an underlying note of optimism in even the most stripped-down of compositions. For fans of Grouper, detuned Steinway pianos and wallowing.
ROF is taken from Hyaline, the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CA based artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Described in the accompanying promo copy as “ghost stories, but not as we know them”, the world building throughout the album is really extraordinary, and the uncanny atmosphere is rarely more dense and intimate than on ROF, where a hushed, Grouper-esque guitar and a glacial vocal takes centre stage as eerie field recordings twist and scuttle in the distance.
The Predatory Wasp 