The shift is apparent from the very beginning. “Love Ruins Everything” opens the record with a confidence that feels almost like a declaration: bright, rhythmic and expansive, with horns, a deeper groove and vocal arrangements that sometimes blur the line between voice and instrument. It is still unmistakably Tiny Habits, but it is a louder and more adventurous version of the band.

That sense of freedom runs throughout Keepers. The album moves between folk, pop, R&B and the influence of the 1970s and 1980s music they were listening to while making it. There are songs that feel intimate and stripped-back alongside moments that are far more rhythmic and expansive. Rather than trying to fit everything into one sound, Tiny Habits eventually realised that the common thread was simply the three of them.

When we speak over Zoom a few days after the release of Keepers, Cinya, Judah and Maya are each at home, preparing for the next chapter: a North American tour that will begin in November. Between getting ready to take the new record on the road, they reflect on the making of the album, why they wanted to push themselves beyond the sound people had come to expect from them, and how three singers who met almost by chance have learned to trust the strange, expansive thing they create together.

Northern Transmissions: “Love Ruins Everything” feels like a deliberate way to open Keepers — it’s bigger, more rhythmic and more confident than some of your earlier work. Why did it feel like the right song to introduce this version of Tiny Habits?

Maya (Tiny Habits): It was kind of like, “rip the Band-Aid off.” The intention behind this album was to be less soft, more outgoing and more belty, which is actually much more reflective of our personalities. We’re not quiet people — we love dancing, laughing and being loud. We wanted to push people right into this new impression of Tiny Habits.

Northern Transmissions: Yes, definitely. The harmonies on Keepers also feel different. At times, they almost become another instrument — on Love Ruins Everything, for example, one of the vocals almost sounds like a trumpet. Did your approach to harmony change while making this record?

Cinya (Tiny Habits): We were listening to a lot of ’70s and ’80s music while making the record, and we had toured with James Taylor the year before, so we were surrounded by that music and his horn section.

We really wanted to have a lot of horns on this record. We were also really inspired by the way artists from that time sang. James Taylor has all these little things he does with his vowels and his voice, and we wanted to experiment with that. With a sophomore album, we felt like there was more we could show. Not because we had anything to prove, but more to ourselves — we wanted to showcase more of what we could do together.

Northern Transmissions: Definitely. Speaking about that, the album moves through so many different musical worlds — R&B, pop, folk, soul, even moments that feel almost Motown-inspired. Did you ever worry that having so much variety might make the album feel less cohesive?

Maya (Tiny Habits): That was probably our biggest concern for a long time. That’s actually part of why Keepers became the title. We were nervous about having a song like Towel next to something like Pattern Of A Person and wondering if they would really feel like they belonged in the same world.

Eventually, we realised that us being ourselves is enough of a through line. It’s the same people playing on all these songs, so there’s always going to be our touch on them.

The sequencing helped too. The songs can live in completely different spaces, but they still feel like they’re all keepers within this one little pocket of our musical world.

Northern Transmissions: You also recorded parts of the album in really different environments — including a farm in upstate New York and Judah’s living room. Did those physical spaces affect the music?

Maya (Tiny Habits): Definitely. In New York, we recorded a few songs live off the floor with Philip Weinrobe on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Those songs have a much more folky, organic essence, and I think that place had a lot to do with it.

The Keepers interlude was recorded in Judah’s living room, and it has this really warm, homemade feeling. It feels very us.

So yeah, I think the places we were recording definitely influenced the overall sound.

Northern Transmissions: There’s a tension throughout Keepers between wanting to be loved and learning how to love yourself. Someone You Love especially felt like it embodied that. Was that something you were consciously thinking about when sequencing the album?

Cinya (Tiny Habits): By the end, the themes just felt really cohesive. At the beginning, we were actually trying to move away from love and heartbreak, and then somehow it came back around. Someone You Love was written by Maya and her cousin, and it’s actually not really about romance.

It’s more about the music industry and trying to be the artist you want to be while having a million different voices telling you what they want from you. Maya did such a good job of making that feeling universal. We all sang it together, and it just felt really beautiful.

Northern Transmissions: Now, speaking about “Belt Loop”. It is another departure, especially in the way it deals with the physical memory of a relationship after the emotional relationship has ended. What made you want to explore that kind of intimacy?

Cinya (Tiny Habits): That song started with Maya’s cousin Benjamin, who also produced the record. It wasn’t like we consciously decided, “Let’s make this kind of song.” It just fell out.

We make pop and R&B for fun, and as a band we hadn’t really discovered that side of ourselves yet, even though we all love that kind of music.

It came after an experience where somebody had been with someone new following a really serious relationship. There was a lot of guilt and mixed feelings around being intimate with somebody new when you’d only ever been with one person for so long. On the surface, the song sounds pretty raunchy and sexy, but the lyrics are actually quite sad.

Northern Transmissions: My favourite song on the album is “Pattern Of A Person” and it is one of the most emotional and complicated songs on the album. There’s the child’s voice, and these ideas around inheritance, family and what we choose to repeat or not repeat. Did you know how personal the song would become when you were writing it?

Judah (Tiny Habits): Yeah, sort of. I think the biggest fear was showing it to my family because it felt pretty obvious that the other two were going to harmonise on it. I didn’t show it to my family for a really long time because I didn’t know how they would react.

It’s such a personal and honest song. But when I finally showed it to them, their reaction was really positive. There were tears, reminiscing and a lot of healing.

That actually made me want to release it even more, because so many people have experienced broken families, absent fathers or being raised by a single mum. I wanted people to feel seen. I wish I’d had a song like that when I was growing up. I think music should be personal. All music should be personal.

Northern Transmissions: Another emotional moment is Survivor’s Guilt and it starts almost like an apology for leaving someone who has hurt you, but by the end you’re singing, “I know the blame’s not on me”. Did you want the music itself to embody that emotional shift?

Cinya (Tiny Habits): That song actually started in a hotel room in Atlanta about two years ago. Maya and Judah were on the floor below me, and I wrote it up to the bridge. Then I went downstairs and we finished it together.

That bridge really came together, and once we had the key change and that energetic shift, I don’t think we could have kept it mellow. We wouldn’t have been doing the song justice.

It was also one of the songs we recorded on the farm, where we were all in the same room singing and playing together. That just felt right for the song.

Northerrn Transmissions: There’s this tension throughout the record between what we keep and what we let go of — people, relationships, even different versions of ourselves. When did the idea of keeping become central to the album?

Cinya (Tiny Habits): Maybe when we decided on the title. I was in a library in Chicago and found a poem where the word “keep” came up a lot, and it really resonated with us. After that, we started finding a million different ways that the word made sense for the songs and the album. We kept chipping away at the songs and the production and discovering more ways that the idea applied.

It wasn’t really an intentional choice where we decided everything had to fit the idea of “keeping”. It was more of a discovery — almost a coincidence that all the songs ended up meeting there.

Northern Transmissions: Yur first record “If All For Something” was partly about figuring out what Tiny Habits could be, what did Keepers teach you about what Tiny Habits actually is?

Maya (Tiny Habits): For the past couple of years, whenever people asked what kind of music we make, our immediate answer was acoustic folk-pop. With this record, I don’t think we’d say that anymore.

Cinya (Tiny Habits): It’s not that we’re trying to say we “do it all”, but there’s so much more to us than just the really quiet acoustic covers in a stairwell. That will always be part of us and where we came from, but this album really opened our eyes to what’s possible.

Judah (Tiny Habits): We were nervous because this record is so different from All For Something and from what we’d put out before, but the positive reaction has made us really excited to keep creating music the way we want to.

Maya (Tiny Habits): People seem to appreciate what we do regardless of what it sounds like, and that makes us feel like there’s so much more for us to explore.

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