Brooklyn-based Hello Mary have announced the March 3, 2023 release of their self-titled debut album via Frenchkiss Records. Today the trio Helena Straight (guitar, vox), Mikaela Oppenheimer (bass), and Stella Wave (drums, vox) – release a new single “Spiral,” taken from the album. On the psychedelic song, Straight and Wave harmonize to dazzling effect on the chorus, while Oppenheimer’s driving bassline tethers them to earth: “Is it a coincidence? You’re hanging out all night, while I’m on the other side,” they sing to an unknown other.
The track and its accompanying video premiered earlier today via Rolling Stone who share, “Hello Mary is an instant contender for 2023’s most bracing entrance to the stage, sharp and self-assured.” Read the full story here. Of the single the band say, “‘Spiral’ is about the feelings of paranoia and jealousy that can come with relationships, and how these feelings can become so strong that they turn into delusions.” The video was directed and edited by Isaac Roberts and shot in NYC at The Slipper room and Tompkins Square Park. Listen/share “Spiral” here and watch the video here:
Mikaela started Hello Mary with Helena as freshmen in high school. When they met Stella by happenstance the three became an inseparable unit – as good of friends as they are bandmates. Today’s announcement and new song follows on the heels of a string of singles the band has shared since the release of their 2020 debut EP Ginger. Several have made it onto the album – this summer’s earwormy “Rabbit,” and the previously released “Sink In,” “Stinge,” and “Looking Right Into the Sun” which features the band’s trademark harmonies and their ability to meld elements of 90s shoegaze with indie rock and grunge into something that is all their own. It was the singles – which unlike the EP were recorded in a proper studio – that garnered the band attention outside the confines of the Brooklyn music community. Wave describes them as the first proper introduction to Hello Mary. They led Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean to laud them as her “ favorite new band” and Tonya Donnelly to call them the,”very rare band who nod to their influences while sounding completely new.” KEXP has since had them into their studios for a session. The growth of their songwriting also led them to their deal with esteemed indie-label Frenchkiss Records.
Hello Mary – which was produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement / Luna) – references alternative rock of the nineties alongside Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley as influences. But the trio’s contemporaries are bands suchs as Palberta, Spirit of the Beehive, and Palehound, artists who don’t shy from unusual time signatures, careening feedback, and unconventional harmonies, all for the sake of surprising a listener.
Pinpointing an individual thought pattern, or resounding theme, risks flattening the trio, who write music and lyrics in tandem, knotting their perspectives together into a singular consciousness. “We collaborate on everything,” Oppenheimer says, “from our lyrics to guitar parts and even bass and drums sometimes.”
Hello Mary was written during a period of immense uncertainty. “We were battling things personally, the world was battling COVID,” Wave says. So there’s a darkness to it that isn’t apparent on first listen. Yet prioritizing sensation over narrative cohesion opens up the ability to make even the most lyrically devastating songs pleasurable. “This might sound vague,” Wave shares, “but to me, this album is about accepting the state of things as they are at a given moment, whether it’s your relationship to another person or the world around you.”
Hello Mary abolishes the individual in favor of collective catharsis, and though its singular meaning eludes the band for the time being, decades on it will articulate the most elusive feeling: “How it felt to be us.”
