Stream: Maddie Jay, ‘Gutterball’

Kevin Bronson on February 10th, 2022

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Bedroom pop alchemist Maddie Jay first got us all sticky with 2020’s “The Peanut Butter Song,” the best (though not the biggest) song on her debut EP, “Mood Swings.”

The native of a small town in British Columbia, who matriculated to Berklee and then to L.A. (where she has played bass for artists such as Lorde, Remi Wolf and Winnetka Bowling League), followed up last year with another EP, “CMYK,” a fanciful collection of lo-fi indie-rock, soul and pop driven by her whimsical beats and airy ruminations. Look no further than the single “Excuses” for therapy by skittish synths.

“Gutterball” is Jay’s first single since “CMYK,” and it’s a song that rolls with the bowling metaphor. “This is a song I made about confronting your patterns that you have learned from your childhood and teenage years,” Jays says. “Something about going into my mid-twenties made me realize that there were some things I was going to have to actively change in the way I approached the world, if I ever wanted to become the adult I envisioned. I imagined it like I am a bowling ball and I have been pitched into the world at a weird angle. If I don’t recognize that, I’m in a gutter, just rolling where my patterns take me, I’ll never get out.”

It’s a coming-of-age story, “steeped in cigarettes and energy drinks,” as she sings. It is not without resignation that she confesses, all pretty-like: “I’m past my growing pains / But I feel them all the same.”

||| Stream: “Gutterball”