See You at The Maypole by Half Waif

Ananda Rose Plunkett didn’t set out to make downer music. It just so happened that her songs, recorded under the moniker Half Waif, gave a great many people ‘drunk in the bathtub’ eyes. But it was a levelling kind of everyday sadness – it wasn’t super specific. For her sixth record, See You At The Maypole, Ananda (Nandi for short) intended to change tack. She wanted to make a concerted effort to get happy. Like a room without a roof, as Pharrell once sang. But rooms without a roof do let the rain in. And owing to a storm of personal circumstance, Maypole’s house almost flooded, her cheerful ambitions backfired, and the album has become an outline of hope ablated by heartbreak.

Plunkett miscarried in late 2023, about the same time that her mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. Grief casts a pall over everything here. These songs adapt, invoking oft-unaddressed loss, specifically miscarriage, in a manner unflinching and devastating – and seldom heard on record. On “Heartwood”, over a wistful drum skitter, her gossamer voice falters to a quaver, though never inaudible: “How can there be life inside me and then death?” The music expiates the very nature of heartbreak: arms outstretched that will remain empty; angry questions with answers absent. Lyrically, she conjures up a green kind of sadness, her imagery inseparable from her rural, upstate New York abode. She marvels at, and curses, the natural world’s ability to inspire and abandon by turns. Slowly, though, the dye of life comes seeping through, like warm light on a winter’s day. You’re not a failure, she says. You’re an ephemeral being. On See You At The Maypole, Half Waif traces grief and speaks exquisitely of the need for communion, however painful that might be – and however irreconcilable the loss.