A more eaze album is a thing of contrasts and juxtapositions. On her 2015 breakthrough, accidental prizes, the composer-producer-songwriter – real name mari maurice rubio – alternated dissonant noise, tuneful acoustic folk and soft-focus ambient. Often the cuts were sudden, willfully jarring, as in the jump from the squall of glass fragments to the lo-fi bedroom folk of the title track. It was a technique she soon perfected, using it on later albums like 2020’s Mari as a sonic metaphor for her own gender dysphoria and subsequent transition. Here she also tapped into the chaotic joy of hyperpop and glitchy electronica, with the aid of collaborators like claire rousay and diamondsoul. The rousay connection was to bear further fruit: last year, the pair collaborated on the gorgeous, melancholic no floor, an album of cut-up acoustica and sweeping avant-Americana.
Now more eaze is back with another solo album, sentence structure in the country, which sees her lean into her love of song and embrace her upbringing as a folk-oriented fiddle player. Again, collaboration is key, and the most prominent guest slot is perhaps Wendy Eisenberg, who sings on the brilliant healing attempt. The verses – sung by more eaze – are clipped by subtle autotuning, but during the chorus the autotune recedes, Eisenberg’s voice rings out clear, and the itchy electronics that hold the song up give way for a few seconds, replaced by twangy country instrumentation. In some ways, it represents a typical more eaze moment of juxtaposition, but it is more subtle, more fluid than drastic about-turns we sometimes see from her.
Eisenberg also contributes piano to bad friend, providing an icy counterpoint to the song’s globular electronic backing and semi-obscured vocals. And on the lingering title track, one of only two instrumentals, Eisenberg’s abstracted electric guitar is intercut with Jade Guterman’s acoustic, while Alice Gerlach’s cello dances with restless fiddles and swirls of electronics. It’s as if an avant-rock band and a country and western group were attempting to play some kind of free jazz/chamber music hybrid. Against all odds, it works. So too does the other instrumental, a chorale, which conjures the spirits of holy minimalism.
Gerlach and Guterman appear on the producer, a minimalist folk-pop masterpiece, where swells of strings grow out of a simple rhythmic bedrock. Here, the lyrics, muted as they are, are allowed space, and they show that more eaze is a writer of shrewd songs of great emotional acuity. She examines the sometimes fraught relationship between personal creativity and the world of art and performance in a remarkably candid way; it’s rare and perhaps a little disconcerting to get such a lucid picture of the artistic process. Opener leave (again) is more abstract, and somehow even more personal, like discovering a snippet of a private message.
On distance, the instrumentation is warmer, building up layers from a starting point of billowing ambience, so that more eaze’s soft vocals feel enrobed. The growing jazzy clatter of Ryan Sawyer’s drums eases the song into a state of something approaching euphoria. The multifaceted crunch the numbers is another highlight: ambient pulses morph into a kind of slow-burning improvised chaos, which then begins to retreat into pastoral melodicism as the song draws to a close. biters is all antsy blips, scattered drum beats, distorted electronics and barely-concealed frustration for its first half, and then that trademark more eaze contrast comes into play again, and the clattering post-country instrumentation provides a kind of release. The final track, move, has an open and comparatively contented feel to it. The simple chords and poppy melody have a lullaby-like effect, but like everything else on this extraordinary album, it has hidden personal depths. sentence structure in the country leverages more of eaze’s bewildering array of influences into a sustained, emotionally resonant and surprisingly compact work of art.
sentence structure in the country (March 20th, 2026) Thrill Jockey
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