Miya Folick Looks For the Light

After the tour for her sophomore album ROACH, indie-pop chameleon Miya Folick found herself burnt out and feared she may never write a song again. “I just didn’t think I had it in me. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to write new music. I’m the kind of person who toxically wants to be productive all the time, and I’m the kind of person who feels a lot of guilt when they don’t ‘do something with their day,’” Folick tells me over Zoom, and I don’t doubt that latter sentiment. At one point during our call she says that if she ever had an office job, she’d need a treadmill desk because of all her “nervous energy.” 

But she quelled her drive to constantly create following tour and allowed herself to simply be—just eat, take long strolls and do a whole lot of nothing. It wasn’t idyllic, but it was necessary. “I had a month of rest and relaxation, and deep depression, and then I emerged,” she says. “And then once I started writing, suddenly [Erotica Veronica] was done. What was interesting about the process was, at no point was I like, ‘Oh, here I go. I’m writing my album.’ I think I was just naturally writing again, trying not to put too much pressure on it, and going for a lot of walks.”

Walking is a large part of her process—a revelation that initially surprises me considering Folick lives in Los Angeles, which, in my mind, is all asphalt and bumper-to-bumper traffic. She’s quick to disabuse me of that notion: “I think LA is very walkable, and people do walk… I walk everywhere. I think because it is sprawling to get to certain places, you need to walk pretty far.” She prefers walking or biking in Los Angeles to driving, later adding with a laugh: “But I will say that my favorite walks are walks to go get a treat. So sometimes I will just walk randomly, but often I’m going somewhere, and that somewhere is a bakery. That’s a big incentive for me to walk far distances.” Honestly, same. 

Folick’s love for LA—“Every piece of music I make is a love letter to this city,” she tells me—is baked into the very creation of her latest album Erotica Veronica, which was released on February 28 via Nettwerk. The LP takes us from playful flirtations on “Erotica” (“The erotic doesn’t have it to happen at night,” she says. “I think that the erotic can also just be this, like, sweet sensual experience in nature”) back to past heartbreak on “This Time Around” (The line “You cut mе with a comment in parenthesеs” will always get me).

“It’s a very LA record in that it was made both in studio and at home,” she says, later explaining: “We have access to so many studios here both like full scale, tracking room, control room, kind of studios, but also home studios. I mean, that’s the beauty of Los Angeles. As I’m saying that, I’m thinking about all the people who lost their studios in these fires, and it’s just totally heartbreaking. They’re such special places. Everyone’s home studio is a beautiful, special place. People put so much care into those spaces. Yeah, it’s hard not to think about that.” 

Folick assembled her collaborators at Tropico Beauty in Glendale for the first Erotica Veronica recording stint, before deciding that a couple of the songs required a larger space to match the sound she was aiming for. In order to achieve that, she went to Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 to record “Fist” and “Love Wants Me Dead.” The former is an emotionally tumultuous slow burn, following a narrator whose self-sabotaging tendencies deepen the fissures in a relationship’s foundation into an insurmountable abyss. The sweetly-sung, vignette-like start builds to Folick’s guttural scream, backed by spacious, robust drums and zinging guitar—a sonic backdrop enabled by the size of Studio 606. The instrumentation grows sparer towards the end as she repeats, “I punch myself in the face with my own little fist / Then I collapse into you.” It’s one of the album’s most devastating tracks, reminding the listener of all the times you’ve hurt both yourself and your loved ones, sometimes for no apparent reason other than the fact that “this rage / is my inheritance.” “Love Wants Me Dead,” the penultimate song on Erotica Veronica, starts simply with just Folick’s voice, strummed guitar and the barest whisper of synth. As the song unfurls, steadily marching drums and backing vocals join the party, the fullness of sound growing as Folick declares passionately, almost ecstatically, ”Love wants me dead.” I’ve always admired her ability to make her crystalline voice reach stratospheric heights, all while maintaining a strength beneath it that nonetheless allows vulnerability to creep in. The bridge of “Love Wants Me Dead” showcases this enviable quality over screeching guitars and propulsive drums—a fitting climax for one of the rawest and most immediate albums of the year so far. 

While the full band recorded in Studio 606 and Tropico to capture the richness of their sound, most of the piano and synth and all of the vocals were recorded later on at home studios. Folick produced the Erotica Veronica, a process that she found “fun and fulfilling, and also difficult and arduous and lonely at times to be the person having to make all the decisions.” She’s not a rookie producer—she produced her two EPs, 2015’s Strange Darling and 2017’s Give It To Me—but it is the first time she’s produced one of her albums.  

“After those two EPs, I was swept up into the industry of it all, and felt like I was supposed to find a producer partner who would be an answer to this question of… how do I make my music sound like the utmost of what it could be? How could I bring it beyond my own abilities? I think that was the question that I was trying to answer, and it was also just industry standard for an artist to work with producers. And I was very green in the industry,” she explains.

I first fell in love with Folick’s music through her debut album Premonitions (2018)—a synth-pop whirlwind that highlights her inimitable voice and piercing lyricism, particularly the anti-rape culture track “Deadbody.” Next was ROACH in 2023, the album whose tour precipitated the inception of Erotica Veronica. Reflecting on those albums, she says, “It’s not that I don’t like those records, because I do. I think they’re very good and I enjoy them, but I think there’s an intimacy that is lost when my ideas are translated through another person… On this record, I felt like I really wanted it to feel like more of a direct conduit between my intimate experience and what the music sounds like.” Part of that directness involved Folick getting back to her roots: guitar music. Premonition and ROACH bounce on neon waves of synth, whereas Erotica Veronica is a distinctively guitar-forward album, whether we’re talking about chunky riffs or gentle acoustic moments. When I ask if that was a conscious choice, Folick explains, “When I was writing this record, most of the songs I wrote on acoustic guitar. So I felt like it needed to be a guitar record, and there wasn’t really another option.”

Self-producing wasn’t just an emotional choice—it was a financial one as well. “Honestly, I feel like [budgetary reasons] are almost just as important as the emotional reasons, because the they are kind of also emotional, and what I mean by that is there’s only so much money you have to make a record, and usually a large portion of that money goes to the producer, and then there’s less money for everything else,” she says. “There’s less money to pay players. There’s less money for time in the studio, and there’s less money to get it mixed and mastered, and there’s absolutely no money left over for me, absolutely none.” 

And while she’d planned to pay herself, Folick ended up with nothing left once she’d paid for studio time, her fellow musicians (Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Waylon Rector and Greg Uhlmann all on guitar, and Pat Kelly on bass) and co-producer/drummer Sam KS. It’s a testament to how difficult it is for artists these days—even when they take measures to try to financially recoup, ultimately the deck is stacked against them. 

Whatever it says on the balance sheet, Folick tells me, “I feel really proud of the record, and to me, more than it being a reflection of my production, I think it’s really a reflection of my community, because yes, it sounds intimate and it sounds like what I intended it to sound like, but to me it also sounds like my friends. Those are what my friends sound like when they play their instruments… When I listen to it, I don’t think, ‘Wow, I produced this.’ I think, ‘Oh, my God, Meg sounds amazing on this,’ or, ‘Sam sounds incredible,’ or, ‘The mix is so good.’”

Besides her talented array of friends, Erotica Veronica also sounds like letting life’s light in. The tracks are dappled in rays of sunshine, whether thanks to Folick’s summery, Cranberries-esque vocalizations, like on “La Da Da,” or the song titles themselves (“Prism of Light,” “Light Through the Linen”). She wrote “Prism of Light” after listening to an interview with a rabbi, explaining to me, “I think the thing that struck me was this idea of when you’re in despair, it’s very important to notice the light, to like really notice it, but also to share it with others, even by just saying, ‘Look at that light over there.’ And then, by doing that, we can help each other collectively see that light. And I think that that, to me, is a very different sentiment than toxic positivity, which I don’t like. It’s really just like this gentle suggestion of like, ‘Wow, look at the sunset today.’” 

When Folick drives around LA, she’s sure to point out these small moments of wonder with a simple observation like, “That’s a good hill.” It’s so endemic to her speech that her co-producer, Sam KS, picked up the habit. “I’m not even sure if he knows that he got it from me, but he’ll be like, ‘Good hill. Good sky today,’” she says with a laugh, later continuing: “It’s beautiful and I think that [noticing the light] felt like an important aspect to this story because there is a lot of sadness and struggle in the record, but I wanted to end it with ‘Light Through the Linen,’ because I wanted to end it on this feeling of hope.”

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s associate music editor.