Four years ago the Galway singer-songwriter Maija Sofia released her debut album, Bath Time, a collection of songs that shared tales of historical women deemed unwelcome by patriarchal regimes. From Bridget Cleary, the Tipperary woman murdered in 1895 by her husband because he believed she had been kidnapped by fairies and replaced with a changeling, to Edie Sedgwick, the 1960s model and actor who was one of Andy Warhol’s Factory scenesters, Bath Time’s freak-folk suite of songs highlighted the relentless injustices that women have been, and are, victims of.
Much, however, has changed in Sofia’s world since 2019. Six months after that album release, she moved from Dublin to take up an artistic residency at Sirius Arts Centre, in Cobh, Co Cork, to research (fully alert to the building’s reputation for eeriness) “digital intimacy, female experience and how the figure of the witch has found a renewed interest in online spaces”. She found in her solitary confinement a voice she had never previously fully expressed. If Bath Time is an album thrumming with tales of other women, True Love is pretty much about Sofia herself.
Its opening track, Saint Sebastian, sets the tone with a musical palette that incorporates harp (Méabh McKenna), clarinet (Ryan Hardagon) and lyrics that view the spiritual and the sensual in equal light. But it is the second song, the album’s lead single, that sets out Sofia’s stall: Four Winters powerfully complements the unnerving setting of where she wrote it, haunted-house keyboards segueing into a narrative that outlines a sexual attack. “I’m going out tonight,” Sofia sings, full of charged confidence, “I’ll wear the dress that I was raped in. I’m not frightened any more, I’m not scared of anything, I’ll wear the dress that I was changed in ... I’ll make myself thinner, disappear right into the ether.”
There is genuine exorcism here, cathartic expulsions that make sense given the contexts – the songs reach into deep recesses to remove potentially toxic waste. Clever use of instrumentation, including theremin (by the Landless member Ruth Clinton) and pedal steel (by the Tandem Felix mainstay David Tapley), shapes the songs into nuggets of compelling alt.folk, but it’s Sofia’s voice, slight but underpinned by steeliness, that hooks the deepest.
