QWERTY
When it comes to self-analysis, Saya Gray doesn’t mince words. “I’m a complete fucking crazy person,” she tells Apple Music. “Like, actually completely mad. Sometimes it gets documented—and this is one of those times.” Gray’s sophomore release, *QWERTY*, arrives less than a year after her 2022 debut, *19 Masters*, which saw the Toronto-based artist shed her identity as touring bassist for artists such as Daniel Caesar, and reinvent herself as an art-pop alchemist. And with *QWERTY*, she pushes her stream-of-consciousness songwriting and genre-mashing experimentation to new extremes of aggression and abstraction, landing somewhere between the sensory overload of hyperpop and the impressionistic soundscapes of post-rock (with lethal injections of metal, industrial, and drum ’n’ bass added for good measure). Gray claims she’s prone to blacking out while making music, resulting in songs that she doesn’t remember recording, made up of sounds she doesn’t know how to recreate. And on *QWERTY*, she viscerally conjures the sensation of walking through a disturbing dream, each track a surrealist procession of jarring sonic juxtapositions and elliptical conversations. Created in the wake of, in her words, “a lot of people dying around me,” *QWERTY* is the sound of a skull being cracked open to uncork all the raw emotions, random thoughts, and apocalyptic visions bubbling up within, while challenging the listener to make sense of the mess. “I’m documenting mistakes rather than my perfection,” Gray says. Here, she talks through each of the songs on the album. **“DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY”** “Some of these songs are, like, 20 songs in one, and ‘DIZZY’ is one of those. I had originally produced the beat for a different artist, and then ended up doing a session with \[drummer\] Marito Marques, and he’s just like a fucking animal. I recorded him for an entire day, just shredding. Most of the live drum sounds on this record ended up being me sampling him on my Akai MPC. And that’s happened on this track: I started fucking with his drums, and it was so crazy that I was like, ‘I gotta get on this!’ It’s like the epitome of my thousand personalities in this one song. At one point, it sounds like there’s a tape playing, and it sounds quite noisy. But that’s actually my mom making udon noodles while I was playing piano. I was at her house for Christmas, and that’s what that tape fuzziness is—it’s udon. You can also hear her cleaning things and humming in the background.” **“;.).”** “Honestly, this is one of the only ones I can consciously talk about—like, I consciously made this. I didn’t black out. Like, ‘DIZZY PPL’—I don’t even remember making that. But this one, I made at \[Peter Gabriel’s\] Real World \[Studios\]. It was a whole different song, like four times as fast. But the pianos there just have so much resonance to them, and so I woke up early and put that part down. And then, during that day of recording Marito, he was doing these disgusting drum ’n’ bass beats. And I was like, ‘It’s so good, I have to fuck with it.’ So, I ended up just throwing it through my MPC. I use a lot of analog gear and drum machines because I just love how they’re like humans—they make mistakes.” **“;\_(\"** “So, I have no idea about this one. Sometimes I do this thing—it’s really annoying for everybody—where I’ll just make something and then delete the \[original\] session and then work off the bounce \[track\]. And then I have no fucking idea how to find it anymore. So, this is literally an MP3 that I just found, and I was like, ‘This is so sick!’ But I don’t know where it’s from or where the session is—it’s deleted, it’s gone.” **“PREYING MANTIS !”** “This one is actually, like, five songs. And thank god for my brother for this one, because I’m, like, a mess. I’m crazy, and I would have no order, but my brother’s a lot smarter and more logical than me. He can section out things for me. We made this one in \[my label\] Dirty Hit’s studio. He made this, like, 30-minute piece on his Akai MPC of robotic/cyborg punk-drum madness. And he sent it to me and was like, ‘Oh, look what I made!’ It took him months to make, it was so much work. And then I ended up just taking pieces of it to make ‘PREYING MANTIS !’” **“ANNIE, I SING FOR..”** “I literally sat and made this entire song in, like, two hours. Basically, this song was like my bargain with grief, and other people’s bargain with grief. That’s really all I can say. It’s just pain, you know what I mean?” **“..2 2 CENTIPEDES”** “This was another one where I completely blacked out—I literally don’t remember it. But honest to god, this is like my ode to insects. I just love their place in the ecosystem and how committed they are to their purpose. And I find humans fucking exhausting—the constant projection, the way we move. Even though this is one of those ones where I don’t remember making it, I can tell you that it’s the most relevant to how I feel on an everyday basis. I feel like people don’t say what they mean or mean what they say anymore. Everyone’s a fucking brand now. I feel like we’re just missing honesty.” **“ok FURIKAKE”** “This one’s like a hundred things collaged into one. Again, it’s about my confusion and frustration with people’s dishonesty. This record was really made through a lot of pain.”
The art-pop musician’s latest EP is a bleary, semiconscious rush that invites you to get lost inside it.