As a teenager, I was so fascinated by M.I.A.’s 2010 album MAYA that I designed my own t-shirt in homage to its cover, a truly awful looking top with YouTube bars pasted across it, created using a five-pound white Primark shirt and iron-on transfer paper. The album, its alien sound, its cluttered internet-themed cover, I found captivating. More a catapult from M.I.A.’s earlier work than a progressive departure however, MAYA received poor reviews from critics, many of whom found its “digital ruckus” sound to be rusty and unpolished.
Twelve years on from its original release, the album deserves a fresh listen. MAYA wasn’t by any means the first to utilise clashing, metallic sounds, but listening in 2022, in a world which has now experienced myriads of great, noisy, tech-centred pop from the likes of A.G. Cook and Arca, a case can be made for MAYA’s polarising industrial-pop sound as being just ahead of the curve.
The album is a chaotic sprawl of genres and styles but maintains a general cohesion via its industrial, maximalist personality. M.I.A.’s vocal delivery is often relaxed but not bored, rather it works in balance with the album’s jerky, electric sound, best exemplified by ‘STORY TO BE TOLD’, an album highlight where M.I.A. raps coolly over a shuddering beat. As a whole package, it’s an entertaining one. The deluxe edition clocks in at just under an hour long and is stuffed to the brim with ideas and textures, with livewire production from Blaqstarr and Rusko.
Admittedly, MAYA is not without its flaws. The overuse of auto-tune can be jarring, and one or two of the tracks here are oddly lifeless. Intro track ‘THE MESSAGE’ is a little crunchy and half-baked lyrically, and ‘IT IZ WHAT IT IZ’ is a sleepy tune without much impact.
Aside from these, however, nearly all of the experiments on MAYA are worthwhile, or certainly memorable. ‘STEPPIN UP’ sounds like a SOPHIE track from an alternate dimension, ‘IT TAKES A MUSCLE’ is a squeaky lovesong with a punchy chorus, and the Fonejacker-sampling ‘INTERNET CONNECTION’ is quirky good fun. Best track of all is the Switch-produced ‘BORN FREE’, a frenetic banger which mutates its sample of Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’ to an exhilarating speed, so much so that it ends with a five-second break for you to catch your breath.
While her prior albums Arular and Kala are certainly more accessible and polished, and contain some of the noughties’ strongest pop tunes altogether, there’s something captivating about M.I.A.’s weird tonal shift on this, her third album. The last decade has seen a huge surge in poptimism, but where pop music’s detractors remain, they will often ignore it as a genre due to finding it uninventive or vapid. With MAYA, M.I.A. exhibited that pop music can so often be punky, bizarre, or even uncomfortable.