Mazie, a Baltimore artist, is leading the next evolution of psychedelic pop. Mazie releases her ambitious debut album, blotter baby (a nod to her love of hallucinogens) along with a trippy music video for “are you feeling it now”. Throughout her self-described “psychedelic exploration,” the 23-year-old confronts coming-of-age heartbreak and a Gen-Z doom mindset with catharsis and absurdity.
“Blotter Baby” travels through decades of psychedelic rock influences before arriving in 2023 to meet Mazie’s brazen and fatalistic lyricism and Elie Rizk’s (Bella Poarch, Remi Wolf) polished alt-pop production. Mazie shamelessly sings of sapphic makeout sessions (“girls just want to have sex”), wanting to look hot at her own funeral (“I look good”), and her own toxic relationship patterns over ’60s and ’70s-inspired pop hooks.
The musical references range from bouncy Beach Boys chords (“life is a long goodbye”) to dreamy beats reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (“somebody to lose”). With songs like “menace” and the spacey “are you feeling it now,” Mazie taps into her own intuition for infectious, earworm pop. Her massive hit “dumb dumb,” a manic anthem that has since gained more than 250 million global streams, 1 million TikTok creates, and a feature in Netflix’s original film Do Revenge, is also included on the album.
Mazie’s artistry and the sonic infrastructure of blotter baby are both influenced by psychedelia, as a musical genre and a therapeutic practice. While doing so, she draws inspiration from both classic psychedelic rock influences (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead) and modern psychedelic rock acts (Crumb, Tame Impala, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard). Fragments of Mazie’s muses are refracted through her prismatic rose-colored glasses, exemplified in “another life,” “all I ever wanted (was you),” and “life is a long goodbye”.
Mazie, who studied classical and jazz singing from a young age, made her online debut with 2020’s “no friends,” a whimsical debut single she co-wrote with then-neighbor and producer Elie Rizk. Taking the success as a sign to drop out of college, relocate to Los Angeles, and never look back, Mazie quickly released the rainbow cassette, her debut 2021 EP, which she describes as “an ode to an ending of my childhood.”
Mazie is emerging as a multifaceted icon who is aspirationally imperfect, pushing her artistry into more over-the-top, vulnerable, and musically adventurous territory with blotter baby. She says she hopes people can see themselves, but she’s not the first person who comes to mind when you think of a good example.
