Today sees the release of a new video from mxmtoon, entitled “Fever Dream.” The 19-year-old singer/songwriter mxmtoon delivers what she calls “rhyming diary entries”: an off-the-cuff account of her most private thoughts and feelings, usually dashed off very late at night, straight from her brightly lit brain. The now Brooklyn-based artist released her debut EP Plum Blossom in 2018. “Fever Dream” is lifted off her current release masquerade.

“When I first started making music it felt like an escape from my day-to-day life, where I’d have to put on a mask to hide what I was really feeling,” says maia in reflecting on the title to the masquerade. “Writing songs was a way to express all the things I couldn’t talk about in face-to-face interactions, and share them with a community of people who maybe also needed to put up a façade to get through the day.”

Newly relocated from her native Oakland, maia is currently at work on a pair of back-to-back EPs due out later this year with the first single the spellbinding “fever dream.” With its soaring chorus and shapeshifting textures, the song finds mxmtoon executing her sound on a far more sonically adventurous scale than she’s ever explored before.

maia gives some insight into the song telling us “launching myself into the music industry was a rollercoaster chapter in my life, and even still i’m extremely new to this world. “fever dream” is about exactly that, and the leap of faith that’s required when you make decisions in your life at different points. you may not always know the outcome, but trusting yourself, allowing yourself the opportunity to take risks, and the chance to face new challenges can be utterly rewarding. much of my life since has felt like a fever dream, a blur of moments sometimes too grand to even comprehend, but i wouldn’t have it any other way.”