Maya Hawke wants you to know she’s magical — or at least, 11-year-old Maya did when she let a coven of New York witches duct-tape her soul back together. “They laid me down on a table, surrounded me with crystals, and recorded the whole thing,” she says, sounding like she’s recalling last Tuesday instead of a childhood exorcism session. “They told me I had a breastplate on my chest — an armor plate of a knight — and they wanted to replace it with a golden bubble. Which, honestly, let way too much stuff in.”
This is the kind of woo-woo origin story you wish every folk-pop record had, but Chaos Angel is not your average witch’s brew. It’s a patchwork album stitched from cast-offs she once thought she wasn’t “good enough” to record. “I kept these songs off my first two records because I didn’t know how to get what I heard in my head out into the room,” Hawke says. “But through Blush and Moss I learned how to do that. I finally trusted myself.”
Trust and faith are all over Chaos Angel. The album opens with a line from that long-lost witch tape: “You become the angel in human form.” She didn’t even plan that. “We were scrolling through the tape for a different piece to use, and we found that line,” she says. “It just clicked.”
If you think this is just sensitive indie folk, think again. Chaos Angel is a hurricane of little emotional mantras. Give up, be loved. If you’re okay, then I’m okay. I’m sorry. Over and over, like an anxious TikTok trend for your frontal cortex. “I tried to thread these modern mantras throughout the record,” Hawke explains. “Because the big wishes are too big. You can’t always wish for world peace. But you can wish to give up. And be loved.”
It helps that her tribe showed up to chant those wishes with her. The record’s finale has a whole Magnolia-style choir — her brother, her producer Christian Lee Hutson, a band of old high school friends — all repeating “Give up, be loved” like a magic spell. “Every voice you hear is someone who loves me, telling me to chill,” she says, grinning. “Who needs witches when you’ve got friends like these?”
Hawke also found inspiration in the cosmic “why even try?” void we call modern society. The album’s final track, Big Idea, takes Ginsberg’s iconic line about the “best minds of my generation” and twists it into a grim joke: “I saw the greatest minds dismantle the system only to replace it.” She sighs, “Every generation thinks they’re reinventing everything — and destroying it at the same time. It’s exhausting.”
But for an artist who once needed witches to peel back her protective armor, she sounds ready for the next existential spiral. “Faith is a useful tool,” she says. “If you can’t offer trust, maybe you can ask for faith instead. The possibility that it matters makes it worth doing.”
And if it doesn’t? Well, maybe the golden bubble’s working after all.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
