97. Album Review of IS THIS WHAT I SEE? by Myah
Originally published on March 1st, 2025
About the Artist
Serendipity. I’m going insult my readers’ intelligence by typing out the definition. “The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” An example of serendipity would be this review I am writing right now.
“Why,” you ask, “is this moment serendipitous?” Well, the answer to that is Myah didn’t submit music for review this month. She DID, however submit a song for review back in August. A song that I thought was extremely impressive. Unfortunately, as I was just starting with Fifteen Minutes of Fame and was generally finding myself overwhelmed with trying to find a way to manage the submissions organizationally, I didn’t publish a review for her very good song. I’ve regretted it ever since.
So much, I mention wanting to have done the review for the song when I did a blind reaction for one of her music videos. I mentioned it to my wife in conversation a couple of months ago. Then, last month, I learned that she released her first (ever) full length project. As I pressed play, track after track proved this was the reason I failed to publish a review by this incredible artist before. I was meant to save it for this release.
Myah is a pop rock and R&B musician from Los Angeles, California. She is Pop in the sense that Lorde is pop. Yea, that’s the appropriate genre but the music is almost too prodigious to be grouped with other musicians within the genre.
She debuted in 2019 with the release of the stripped piano ballad, Better Not. In spite of its minimalist accompaniment and raw production, the talent is immediately evident listening to the vulnerability in her transition to the minor progression throughout the song.
It would be 4 years before she would release a follow up. Well worth the wait. In 2023, Hide released on August 11th. Showcasing a dramatic development in production value, Hide was a more complex release altogether. Driven by electronic percussion, dynamic use of audio effects, and a very cool backing vocal performance enhanced by vocoder, Hide perpetuated the growth potential Myah showed in her, very good, first release.
2024 would show a drastic increase in music for Myah. She would release 11 singles, beginning with Everything in February, Always Want You in March, two releases in April, Hurricane in June, the elusive song Flames that introduced me to her work, familiar in August, a potentially breakout song, The Lobby; a song about her ex that features a self-produced music video that has garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube, a pair of brilliant covers released on a project aptly titled “Myah’s Version,” and concluding the year with November 29’s release of lightning.
Myah’s carefully crafted play on words, her ability to shift from a whisper to a scream, and the superb production quality of her releases make her an artist with the potential to break out into mainstream music yesterday. It’s honestly a wonder that it hasn’t happened yet.
About the Album
Is This What I See? is an 8-song album released by Myah on January 10th, 2025. At just 26 minutes, its technical classification would be an EP, but being as I’m so official (best I could do to find a sarcasm font on such short notice), I decided I would stick with the placement in Spotify. Is This What I See? features 3 of Myah’s previously released singles; I'll Be Your Light, Notice You, and as if I were writing a redemption story fit for the silver screen, the no longer elusive masterpiece, Flames.
About the Music
“Is This What I See?” is a progressive pop rock, R&B album. That’s really a generalized examination, if I’m being honest. Myah uses a equal mixture of live or organic instrumentation and digital accompaniment within each composition. Stylistically, as previously mentioned, I think she sounds very similar to Lorde, like Pure Heroine era, maybe some similarities to Solar Power as well. I also hear a vocal similarity to Taylor Swift, which is possibly one of her influences, seeing as she covered her. It’s the delivery of her lyrics that remind me of Taylor. Myah has that very special, very beautiful sounding cadence that presents itself on the delivery of some of her lyrics. Very similar to how Taylor can sometimes deliver her lyrics to her listeners.
Musically, Myah’s album revolves around thematic chord progressions that seem to join together making each individual song turn into this epic collection of stories coming together to tell one singular tale. The entire album is strong; there’s not a “skip song” or a lull in the energy it gives. It also plays better when listened from start to finish.
It’s my opinion that the strongest song on the album is i'll be your light. The fuzz effect on the bass paired with the several vocal parts, layering and harmonizing with one another; at one point driving to melodic parts, is basically perfect. If I had produced that song, I would have been sitting back with a big smile on my face at playback. It’s really extraordinary work.
I think flames is another song that stands out on the record. The percussion acted as a pulse to the song, giving it its own life as Myah nearly whispers her lyrics. She moves from verse to chorus as if she’s taking her listener’s hand and leading them through a house of mirrors, like the ones you see at a carnival. However, along with the reflection, there are colors of emotion reflecting back, giving further insight into her state of mind as she unveils each line.
I also think say it is one of Myah’s strongest performances. Relying heavily on vocal performance, the accompaniment comes in holding back to showcase her extraordinary vocal work. The percussion is phenomenal in this song. Introducing layer after layer as the song builds and swells. It really brings energy to the performance.
Myah has produced an extraordinary album. Any one of the songs on this record has blow up potential and could catapult her to the mainstream spotlight. As great as the quality of this record is from a production standpoint, it’s really interesting because I could almost picture her performing each one of these songs on an acoustic guitar in a coffee shop. These songs have multi-faceted textures that really allow the music to live and dwell in many places. They’re not just pop. They’re electronic, they’re alternative, they’re house. There are levels to each plane explored. There’s something new heard after each listen. This is a musician’s album.
About the Lyrics
Lyrically, “Is This What I See?” is just as extraordinary as the musical quality of the album. This is true for every performance but, particularly here, the energy of the lyrics often tends to feed into the musicality of each song and vice versa.
I particularly love the lyrics in notice you. “Walked on in like I owned the room. Looking around trying to find you. Locked in your eyes, it’s nothing new. They all wanna hang, so what you gonna do? Are you noticing me like I notice you? Are you noticing me like I notice you?”
I love how it tells a subject’s tale in a way that considers the object’s perspective from the subject’s. It’s as if she’s giving parallel insights simultaneously in this situation where there’s a building potential romance between the two.
“Cause I,I,I don’t understand you. And I, I, I’m not supposed to. Are we doing this thing will you see it through? Are we gonna get lost in this crowded room? Cause I’I, I wanna figure out what you are about. Close the distance between me and you. I see you’re looking at me I know you want it too. I see you’re looking at me I know you want it too.”
The chorus addresses the physical energy between two people in the moments of attraction, as if it was its own law perceived by Sir Isaac Newton. It’s these moments of relative thought that make Myah’s lyrics so magnetic. I imagine them to be very personal to her and yet they have a very particular way about them that can be very personal to the listener. It’s a deeply profound connection between the artist and her listeners.
Final Thoughts
I have no doubts that Myah can compete in the market of mainstream popular music. Stylistically, I think that the composition is stronger than much of what we hear the industry pushing out today. Myah’s album is dynamically powerful and it resonates. The music is catch, but in no way is it cliche. Often, those two go hand in hand. That’s not the case here, which is a desirable trait to have in the production value of music that is being released. To echo things I’ve mentioned with other artists, it’s one thing to follow or repeat a trend. It’s another to set a trend. Myah’s album is marked with familiar sounds; hip hop beats, DJ production markers, popular vocal effects like reverb, echo/delay, chorus, and vocoder effects, as well as layering patches to fill the sound space. Familiarity is obviously a good quality to have as it draws the listener to the song. But Myah takes it a step further by utilizing these familiar tools in ways that authenticate her sound, rather than replicating a sound of others. I’m not sure if this album is self-produced or if she is working with somebody, but hats off to the production.
In addition to the quality of music, Myah fits the profile in other ways. Myah has a strong, influential presence on social media, with her platforms on YouTube and TikTok earning tens of thousands of followers. In her content, she exhibits a charming and witty manner often revealing a tremendous sense of humor. She is candid, she is willing to open up and share personal experiences, like my favorite where she chronicles being the “non-famous” ex of a “famous” person. Her music video for The Lobby, takes a comedic perspective on the aftermath of this relationship which is therapeutic to what was, seemingly otherwise, a toxic environment.
For the record, it’s not important who her ex is. He is just another person who has appeared in franchise movies like Scream, as depicted in this completely unrelated clip from Scream 6 where the character Jason is brutally murdered by Ghostface- totally unrelated. And also in the MCU Spider-man franchise like this completely unrelated clip of the character Flash Thompson. If this WERE the same person, I imagine they would have made the same face when they saw how they were epically trolled in The Lobby. Not saying it’s the same person though.
That would be petty of me.
But I digress! The bottom line is, Myah has all of the tools in the bag to be a mainstream musician. The most important one being, she is a phenomenal and dedicated musician.
You can subscribe to her YouTube Channel and follow her on TikTok.
IS THIS WHAT I SEE? is streaming on all major platforms and you can purchase the downloads on Bandcamp.
Go press play!
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