Be Okay! moves through dance-pop, vulnerability and faith without losing Stella Mayn’s sense of self.
Pop is having a very good moment, and it’s refreshing as all hell to hear this kind of thing coming out of WA.
Perth has given us plenty of scruffy psych, garage and guitar bands over the years, so Stella Mayn’s Be Okay! feels like a welcome change of temperature — four tracks of glossy indie-pop, disco basslines, synth love and emotionally direct songwriting that never loses sight of the dancefloor.
Mayn is a Kiwi artist now based in Perth, and her debut EP Be Okay! arrives with a pretty clear sense of who she is.
There are plenty of familiar pop touchstones in there, but she never leans too heavily on any of them.
Instead, the EP moves between sounds without losing its own identity, which is no small thing in a corner of emerging pop that can sometimes start to blur together.
Opener ‘Dreamworld’ makes that clear immediately.
The bass is ridiculously good – thick, funky and carrying some of that Daft Punk/Nile Rodgers-style disco propulsion – while the rest of the track moves between indie-pop looseness and proper, hands-in-the-air pop ambition.
Lyrically, it sits in that space between wanting more for yourself and being scared to actually go after it. Mayn wrote it from that awkward space between dreaming big and wondering whether you should bother trying at all, and there’s something very relatable in that.
We’re big believers in dreaming here, but at some point you’ve got to walk towards the thing.
‘Sucker’ loosens things up further, opening with a subtle Off the Wall-era funkiness before Mayn’s vocal takes over.
And what a voice.
It’s warm, distinctive and completely unforced, with little touches of reverb used in exactly the right places.
The synths flicker between indie-pop and disco, while the song itself deals with those people who somehow keep wandering back into your life after you’ve finally managed to get over them.
There are traces of that colourful, slightly left-of-centre synth-pop world Laura Jean tapped into on ‘Girls on the TV’, but again, Mayn never sounds like she’s leaning on anyone else.
‘The Bends’ is where the EP properly shows its range.
The production pulls back, giving Mayn’s vocal more room, and the vulnerability hits all the harder because of it. It catches that messy point where you know something isn’t working, but you’re not quite ready to let it go, building from restraint into something bigger and more cinematic.
By the final stretch, Mayn sounds like she’s reaching for something rather than simply singing about it.
Closer ‘Better When You’re Beside Me’ is another shift again.
There’s a warped guitar running through parts of it that brings to mind The Flaming Lips around ‘Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell’, while Mayn’s vocal has something of early Natalie Imbruglia’s appeal — not because they sound identical, but because both understand that emotional weight doesn’t require belting the life out of every line.
Mayn sings with restraint. Breath, phrasing and small changes in tone do a lot of the work.
The song ultimately lands on faith, but Mayn handles it with a light touch, it could easily become overly sentimental territory, but Mayn keeps it personal enough to work.
That’s really the strength of Be Okay! as a whole.
It moves through dreams, bad relationships, vulnerability and faith without pretending any of those things have been neatly resolved. The title isn’t promising that everything is okay.
It’s more like Mayn deciding she probably will be.
And with four tracks this assured, we’re inclined to believe her.
Listen to Be Okay! below.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE YOUR NEXT RELEASE REVIEWED BY HAPPY MAG? IF SO PLEASE SHARE YOUR TRACK HERE.
SUBMIT
