Listen: Bitter by Maisy Kay

Maisy Kay Bitter With muted, steely guitars, the new single from British-born, LA-based alt-pop artist Maisy Kay’s wears its heart on its sleeve from the beginning. Picking over the wreckage of a terminated relationship, Kay portrays herself as fragile, ‘Like a hummingbird trapped in a cage of porcelain’, and drinking again. That muted guitar is gradually surrounded in a wrapping of deep bass and loose, textured percussion, much as Kay’s lyrics gradually strengthen her fragility with something resembling a skeletal strength. The chorus cements Kay’s position, overdubbed vocals reflecting an increasing stamina. Bitter comes in at the point after a relationship where the determination to survive kicks in. Kay’s lyrics swing between a sense of heaviness, weighed by the lost hope of what a relationship could have been, and a resolve to heal and move on. Between a gradually building vocal and some deft instrumentation, Kay has created an emotive piece. Born in Claverley in Shropshire,…