It’s always felt like Maya Hawke has had more to say than her music has let on. ‘Maitreya Corso’ — named after a Buddhism-inspired fantasy heroine — is the record that proves it. Her fourth album, co-produced with husband Christian Lee Hutson, is a semi-autobiographical song cycle about ambition, ego, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming yourself. It is, by some distance, the best thing she’s made.
Even so, the album takes a song or two to fully declare itself. Opener Love Of My Life is a charming, if safe, scene-setter, and Heavy Rain, for all its homely front porch warmth, feels like a footnote beside the richer tracks surrounding it.
But Devil You Know — its chorus arriving like a statement of intent, Hawke's urgent spoken word cutting straight to the bone on nepotism, self-mythology, and creative self doubt — signals what this record is truly capable of.
Lioness is the apex predator here, its layered harmonies unfurling as Hawke namechecks Stranger Things co-star Sadie Sink in a lyric that manages to be both deeply meta and broadly universal.
Last Living Lost Cause wears its ‘Folklore’-era Taylor Swift DNA openly, yet Hawke’s sardonic specificity ensures that it has a voice that is distinctly her own. Slacker In The Rye, built around Odessa Jorgensen’s fiddle, is the album’s simplest and most quietly devastating moment.
Bring Home My Man briefly threatens to stall proceedings as a ballad that, in its pursuit of raw vulnerability, somehow holds itself back from achieving it, like an anchor plunged into the sea. But closer Dream House, a stripped-back campfire lullaby, leaves you teary-eyed without quite knowing why. ‘Maitreya Corso’ isn’t a perfect record, but it is Hawke’s most vital. Having written something that reframes everything that came before it, the question now is where will her adventure take her next?
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