Miya Folick is staying open

It exists not only in sexual practice but in our daily routines: the meals we crave, the books we read, and the feeling we get when a breeze tickles the nape of our neck. In late February, the 35-year-old Southern California native released her third record Erotica Veronica — an expression of desire in all of its forms.

When Miya and I meet, she sits in front of a window, her silhouette backlit by a sunny blue sky and palm trees. It’s the perfect Los Angeles scene. She has just returned home from her local YMCA where she was working as a volunteer organizing donations for Los Angeles fire relief.

The singer-songwriter has spent much of her life living in Southern California. She was born and raised in Santa Ana and currently resides in LA. “I love LA. I feel like I might cry if I start talking about it right now. It’s the best place,” Folick says. “Yes, it’s a sprawling city, but once I found a community here, it felt like a small town to me. People take care of each other here.”

Folick takes her time while telling a story, organizing her ideas into thoughtful cadences. She converses with the same precision and care she brings to her songwriting, pausing often to recenter herself.

Folick’s passion for making music didn’t take off until her college years. While studying acting at New York University, she had a part-time job working at various on-campus music venues. “It almost started more with me being attracted to the music community,” says. The most interesting and exciting people in Miya’s world became the musicians she met at work. She immersed herself in the NYU music scene and practiced guitar in her free time. “It was just a really natural process of finding myself spending more time focusing on music instead of auditioning for weird student films,” she laughs.

After two years in New York City, she transferred to and graduated from the University of Southern California. Part of her decision to move, she says, was giving in to what felt like a natural pull toward building a career in music. Not long after, she launched her career with two EPs, first Strange Darling (2015) and, later, Give It To Me (2017).

In 2018, Miya released her debut record, Premonitions. Heavily influenced by Björk’s Post, Premonitions is a stylistic jack-of-all-trades. “I didn’t want to feel limited by a genre at that time,” Miya says. Melodic and danceable, Premonitions has a little something for everyone — from bubbly pop anthems to guttural head-banging rock tracks.

While Premonitions leans into abstraction, its 2023 successor ROACH tells it like it is. “I said, ‘I’m sick of obscure meanings and I just want everything to be very conversational,’’’ Folick says. ROACH also chooses to settle on an indie rock genre, drawing inspiration from early aughts sounds like Radiohead, Broken Social Scene, and LCD Soundsystem.

Her new record, Erotica Veronica, lives at the sweet spot between the obscurity of Premonitions and the straightforwardness of ROACH. “There are lyrics on Erotica that let you into the song, but you don’t understand every lyric,” she says. “I’m not holding your hand as much.” Her goal is for audiences to connect with and interpret the record without being spoon-fed its exact meaning.

As the title suggests, Erotica Veronica is a narrative of lust, self-exploration, and intimacy. “I wrote this album when I was in a heteronormative relationship with a man, and I wrote it from a place of trying to figure out how to connect with my queerness,” she explains. “Beyond that, I was also trying to connect with my desire in general. I had modeled my desires around what I thought I was supposed to do, rather than my actual desires.”

In the record’s ethereal title track, Folick coos, “I just want to flirt with a girl / In broad daylight on the street.” At a time when Folick felt her queerness being stifled, she indulged in her fantasies by putting pen to paper. The song is light and airy, centring her voice over acoustic guitar and a dreamy piano sequence. Similarly, in stomp-and-holler-esque single “La Da Da,” she speaks of juggling a straight relationship and queer desire: “Got a woman on my mind now / And a man waiting at home.”

While channeling desire can be meditative, it can also put us at odds with the most uncomfortable parts of ourselves. Erotica confronts the good, bad, and ugly of sexual experience — including the desires we wish to curb, but can’t. “Fist,” which Folick regards as a focal point of the record, is a song about sexual preferences shaped by generational trauma. The chorus bemoans: “This rage is my inheritance / I don’t like you when you watch me / Why don’t you take your eyes off me / Before I scream.”

On its first take, Folick felt the song didn’t sound “angry enough.” Wanting to make a change, she re-recorded the song with drummer Carla Azar instead of her partner, Sam KS (whose co-production and drums feature on the rest of the record). For a song centring female rage, she felt the bond between women would provide the chemistry necessary to deliver the emotion she wanted to hit home with. Indeed, as the song reaches a climax, the music swells and Folick begins to howl. “I think the scream on [“Fist”] felt appropriate because generational trauma is so difficult to express. It’s so visceral that it almost feels hard to express in words, and it just makes more sense to scream,” she says.

Folick is no stranger to screaming when it feels too overwhelming to speak. In the second-to-last track “Love Wants Me Dead,” she repeats these words over and over, mimicking cries of desperation. She characterizes love as a woman who tempts her, threatens her, and “rips into [her] belly, everytime.”

Erotica Veronica follows Folick’s process of learning to “fully embody [her]self.” In addition to its lyricism, the production of this record was uniquely personal for her. In past projects, Miya collaborated with several musicians and producers to arrange the final product. “In this record, I’m playing all over it,” she says. This is the first record Miya has produced herself (with the help of KS). “I wanted it to feel warm and big and expansive and easy to listen to,” she says.

While it does, of course, centre desire, Erotica Veronica is not purely about traditional eroticism. More than that, it’s a record about the pursuit of sensuality. “The eroticism that I’m talking about in [Erotica] isn’t necessarily just sex,” Miya says. “It’s also about an erotic relationship with the world and with your life. I think those things are connected—when I feel more stimulated by nature or stimulated intellectually by books, I also feel more stimulated sexually.”

The creative direction for Erotica is grounded in nature and literature, drawing inspiration from vintage Japanese books and erotic novels. The album cover pictures Folick crawling through a mud pit in the Angeles National Forest — her limbs sprawled and white clothes dirtied. “When we were talking about the visuals for this album, I knew I didn’t want it to be me in lingerie or [as] a pin-up doll,” she says. Instead, this image characterizes eroticism as primitive, innate, and utterly human.

If Miya Folick could live in one emotion forever, it’d be desire. By opening herself up to the world around her, she invites desire in. And with Erotica Veronica, Miya encourages her audience to stop and feel that breeze with her.