Donna Missal has announced her mesmerizing new EP, in the mirror, in the night, with the unsettling, off kilter “insecure” co-produced by Sega Bodega and Mura Masa. Listen to Missal sing about cutting ties with a toxic personality below and preorder the entire EP out Feb 11th, 2022 via Harvest Records [Capitol] HERE.
Of “insecure”, Missal shares, “It’s about fakeness and not wanting to be around it. I wrote the lyric and melody to a click track when I was living in New York City over the winter. I was alone in the studio apartment I was renting, under the covers of a bed in the middle of the room. I set a tempo on my computer, tried a time-signature that would stimulate melodic ideas that felt very new and challenging to me, without any music to guide me I felt very free and very alone at once. I was writing about separation, solitude, and emptiness a lot during this time.”
“What does intimacy really mean?” asks Donna Missal. With, in the mirror, in the night, the breakout indie pop star is determined to find out. Written a capella in her bedroom, the collection finds Missal stripping away nearly everything she’s come to be known for—the acrobatic vocals, the blockbuster choruses, the anthemic performances—and instead distilling her work down to its most vital, vulnerable form. The songs here, including “insecure,” and previously released singles “(to me) your face is love,” and “sex is good (but have you tried),” rely on subtlety and insinuation, exploring identity and transformation with keen insight and raw honesty, and the performances are delicate and nuanced to match, with Missal’s hushed vocals wrapped in lush, shape-shifting electronic arrangements from Irish producer Sega Bodega. The result is a vocoder and synth-fueled sound more reminiscent of Bjork or Imogen Heap than anything Missal’s built her reputation on thus far, an immersive, experimental collection of avant-garde pop that balances sonic liberation and personal revelation in equal measure.