For an entire year, Mia Day woke up out of breath. Her father had left her mother, and her partner — the guitarist in her band at the time — soon followed suit. Unmoored and unglued, she made her way through each day doing the only thing that had ever made sense to her: writing music. Those songs, forged during what could only be described as a hell year, comprise the musician’s most vital release yet, Hellier, Forever (out May 17th), which takes its title from a supernatural docuseries Day and her partner used to watch about a spooky Kentucky town — and the fact that if you say its name fast enough, it sounds like 365 days of torture. “I made this album as a way to survive,” she says.

Music has always been a salve for Mia Day. The Seattle musician started playing ukulele and banjo at age nine, inspired by Taylor Swift, as well as ‘90s and early ‘00s mainstays like Radiohead, Oasis, and the Killers. Her father was grappling with cancer at the time, so Day’s aunt, an old-school groupie named Steffy, schooled her on music history during drives in her vintage red Volvo, swinging by KEXP-FM so Mia could dig through the DJs’ promo CDs. Even though streaming music was readily available, Day preferred physical media, poring over the liner notes. No wonder she ended up working at a record store. She wrote her first song at age 11, “Alone,” an emo affair about her troubles in school. “Finding a way to tell my own story and writing is how I started to feel like I wasn't stupid,” she recalls.

Day’s first show followed when she was 12 — a bar gig where she sang over an out-of-key banjo. But that was just practice for future triumphs. Day put out her first LP in 2018, Gold, a collection of strummy Americana with the emotional heart of songwriters like Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. “My most like, important songs to me are the ones where I just like felt like I was a mess and didn't know where to put all my mess,” she says. She then honed her skills at New Orleans’ Loyola University, where she learned music theory for the first time. While attending college, the accolades began pouring in; she was named one of the “best of the Pacific Northwest” by Sub Pop records, and “Rosie,” her alt-folk anthem, was named KEXP’s song of the day in 2021. Soon, she hit the festival circuit, playing Seattle’s Belltown Bloom in May of 2022 and Capitol Hill Block Party in the summer of 2023.

In the midst of this, though, came the hell year. “I was just kind of at a point where I felt like my whole life was falling apart and I was losing everything and I just needed something to hold onto,” she recalls. “For months, I didn't know what to do with myself, so I would just write songs every day.” All emotional turmoil culminated in 10 tracks of gut-wrenching, intense music that’s somehow more gorgeous in its upheaval. “It's also my scream-into-the-void album,” Day explains. “It’s me saying, ‘I will not disappear and I will not let a single person destroy me.’”

The record sounds like growing up, Day’s cool-as-river-water voice flowing over her acoustic guitar as she drives farther down the Interstate from all she knows and loves on opener “Feel It Still,” and watches her ex flourish without her on the title track, her Maggie Rogers-esque vocals etched with bitterness as she thinks back to that docuseries they watched together. At the time, she remembers, aliens and ghosts seemed more real to her than her own life.“I just felt like I was stuck in a place that wasn't real forever and I didn't know how to get out of it or make sense of it,” she says. And then there’s “Exception to the Rule,” a spare slow-burner that Day calls “the most like heartbreaking song I've ever written.” A rumination on all the possible futures she could have had if the people she loved had stayed, the seven-minute track is her most vulnerable yet. “That's how I felt — like I just felt absolutely shattered and was just surrounded by pieces of myself that I didn't know how to pick up,” she says.

Day doesn’t let herself languish in the hellfire, though. Near the end of the album, on “Severed,” she returns to her roots: the grungy, raw music that she listened to in the car with Steffy. “That song felt like a breakthrough for me,” she says. Angsty and super loud, “Severed” is the sound of Day finally pulling herself free from the morass, ending, quite appropriately, with a guttural scream. When recording the song, Day mused that she didn’t remember the last time she’d channeled her frustration, her pain, her loss into something so visceral. One thing was for sure, though — it felt great.

- Brenna Ehrlich