Quiet Light’s music is best listened to during the in-between parts of life, where change is most felt. Fittingly, her mixtape Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 throws the listener into the middle of this moving sound, with ‘Star100’ beginning like a half-heard conversation. Layering delicate harmonies, gliding synths and soft drum patterns, the song spirals through accelerated changes in tempo and pitch until reaching a climax, after which details melt away to leave the bare essentials, concluding with a sampled conversation asking why no one’s midlife crisis ever involves Bagel Bites.
The opening track reworks 2024’s ‘Love90’, a standout from the self-produced projects of Texas-raised artist and medical student Riya Mahesh, released ahead of signing to True Panther, home to Oklou and Jawnino. Her debut with the label is a companion to 2023’s independent Blue Angel Sparkling Silver. It’s a seamless evolution rather than a hard reset, aligning with a prolific set of releases that establish a coherent voice and visual identity.
This latest offering is another exercise in building her signature dreamscapes. It feels obsolete to list the genres touched upon; this is an artist born into a world where music is assembled from archives, algorithms and memories via the internet and IRL. Centered on fragmented themes of love and loss, this release privileges immediacy over polish.
The listener is lulled into a meditative state by the sitar drones of ‘New Dream’, whilst the scattered voicenotes and warped sounds of ‘You Say I Love You’ evoke Madonna’s ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ and Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Still Life’. Quiet Light successfully toes a line many struggle with; this is music rooted in the present, echoing Addison Rae or Dean Blunt, while carrying the timelessness of artists like Mazzy Star.
While Mahesh’s previous work was at its best when constructing impressionistic vignettes, here we see her refined precision as a pop songwriter. Standouts include the pitched-up hooks in ‘Postinternetfame’, as she laments a broken relationship, “singing Jeff Buckley in the car, saying things I know you don’t mean.” On lead single ‘Berlin’, the chorus is reminiscent of Avril Lavigne’s ‘Complicated’, where a deceptively effortless melody opens into a cathartic sing-along. Her skill lies in finding depth in the everyday, shaping simple observations into heartfelt stories.
Moments of intersection are the most central element to the mixtape. A peripheral voice in ‘Self Tape’ declares it “cusp season”– a term describing transitions between zodiac signs and relationships–before abruptly cutting to ‘Postinternetfame’. This flux is underscored by the placement of ‘The Sound Of You Leaving’ as track two. Sparser by design and laced with harmonic ambiguity, it captures the hollow sense of someone walking out of your life. While its position disrupts the mixtape’s flow, its intent feels unmistakable.
There’s a striking coherence to the Quiet Light project, underpinned by a lingering sense of longing. With a discography already defined by depth and conceptual clarity, Mahesh’s latest mixtape demands recognition to match her soft ambition.
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