Between Absence and Radiance, the Push and Pull of Maria Somerville’s "Luster"

Janset Yasar
May 5
3 min read

There’s a swinging door that waits between reality and reverie. Unpushed and unforced. Not because it’s immovable, but because so few can summon the force to swing it wide open. Maria Somerville’s music, dreamy, vast, and blurred at the edges yet never without footing, lets a wisp of that otherworldliness drift in.

Even the track names on her new album Luster hint towards the ethereal: Halo, October Moon, Projections, and Trip all seem designed to blur the boundary between body and mind. They’re songs that will, almost involuntarily, conjure colors, tastes, and numbers for those with (or without) synesthesia. It’s hard to pin down something so mystical, so non-concrete. And yet Somerville, ever the master of orchestrating soundtracks to “bigness”, doesn’t miss her mark. When I ask whether she thinks of her albums as chapters in a larger narrative or as self-contained snapshots, “A bit of both,” she says. “They definitely capture a moment in time, but I don’t always know what they mean until much later.” It’s an explication that reflects the instinctive way she works. The songs might be born out of a setting, or a half-formed feeling, but their significance only reveals itself in hindsight. Like photographs found years after they were taken.

“ I wouldn’t necessarily say I work from a visual place, but maybe the settings I’m in inspire the mood. Slow-moving places,” she says. That slowness seeps into songs like Corrib, which comes to life like a lullaby, unhurried not just in tempo, but in emotional pacing. It feels like the product of long reflection, the kind of internal work that can only happen over time. “And in the darkest times, I still appreciate you / I know I’m not alone / I know I have to go away,” she sings. To move toward darkness, to acknowledge the need to step away from something once warm, isn’t a decision made in haste. It’s a slow yielding, a gradual letting go that only becomes possible after enough quiet nights have passed that teach you the cost of intimacy and the strength it takes to carry it.

Projections, one of the singles from Luster, evokes an immediate sense of disorientation and emotional distance. Its fuzzy basslines and gritty guitars feed into the idea of holding onto a projection of someone else, an illusion rather than the person themselves. “All my love for you is not / Hanging on to something else / It’s not so real / I pretend,” she sings, her voice soaked in echo. The instrumentals mirror the lyrical haze, suggesting that nothing is quite as it seems. The grit, the distortion, the way her voice slips in and out of clarity, it all hints at a love that’s more imagined than lived. Or not lived as the way one would expect.

Halo, heavy yet tender, pulls all the right strings of the shoegaze genre, placing each note on an invisible thread, leaving some hanging on air like an autumn mist. When I ask what first pulled her into the genre, what made it click, she gives the briefest response. “My Bloody Valentine – Loveless. Amazing record,” she blurts, without hesitation. “In this record there was a lot of layering going on in the production, of undoing. Guitar layers, vocal layers, the use of multiple effects.” Each effect introduces a new emotional register, a different kind of distance. The reverb does more than blurring the edges. It opens up space, not just sonically but emotionally, allowing us all to step into a landscape that feels both intimate and unreachable.

Maria Somerville’s Luster lives in that push-and-pull between closeness and distortion, presence and absence, a tension that defines much of her work. It’s not imitation, but a kind of inherited intuition, drawn from the lineage of artists who’ve learned to use noise as a vessel for feeling. Her approach doesn’t recreate the past so much as absorb its emotional logic, filtering it through her own lens until what’s left is unmistakably hers. Luster is blurred but intentional, weightless yet full of gravity.