Eve Maret
For the past half-century, the pursuit of electronic pop has given ambitious artists the tools to transcend the limitations of pop itself. Pioneering work by Jon Hassell, Brian Eno and Neu! took the basic elements of rock and pop and stretched them out into something approximating infinite space. Eno’s lyrics on albums like 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and 1975’s Another Green World are allusive examinations of the idea that human beings can flourish in artificial spaces, complete with synthesizers and hints of the standard rock-band setup electronic music often dismisses. For Nashville electronic music artist Eve Maret, song form is something to be shaped through repetition, and this idea animates her new album New Noise. Maret’s latest music folds in disco, garage rock and — as the album’s title implies — moments of pure sound that are as evocative as the poetry of her pared-down lyrics.
New Noise is Maret’s fifth full-length since she made her debut with 2016’s Say So. Along the way, she’s given a boost to Nashville’s experimental music community as a founder of Hyasynth House, a collective designed to give women and nonbinary and trans people a space to create electronic music. Maret’s take on electronic pop places her at the forefront of a segment of Nashville music that often gets overlooked in favor of more traditional guitar-bass-drums setups. As Maret tells the Scene via phone from her Nashville home, New Noise combines straight-up pop with time-honored ideas partly derived from classical music.
“I’ve always been influenced by pop music,” Maret says. “I mean, when I was really getting into classical music, I was also 8 years old and getting onto iTunes and seeing what the top 10 songs were, and trying to educate myself. I want my music to be accessible, and I want my music to be universal.”
Like a lot of the pop and rock Maret references on the album, New Noise is about getting rid of limitations and looking ahead to the many possible futures of music. Maret was born in Holland, Mich., on Sept. 3, 1993, and she grew up in St. Louis, where she heard blues, rock, pop and classical music. (“I just immediately fell in love with classical music,” she says, noting that her parents took her to hear symphonic music when she was a child.) After moving to Nashville in 2012, she studied business at Belmont University, and she also took drum lessons from Chester Thompson, who has played with Frank Zappa, Genesis and many others.
Maret graduated from Belmont with a business degree in 2016, and she released Say So and 2018’s No More Running before attending music classes at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She is an ambitious artist whose materials came out of the pop landscape, and the time at Mills gave her insight into the mentality of the old-school avant-garde.
“I remember doing my first performance for this class that was a seminar in live electronic performance,” she says. “One of the critiques I received from my teacher was that I was hiding behind beats. For some reason, beats were off-limits. It’s almost like [they were] trying to make the least accessible music possible.”
Maret returned to Nashville in early 2020, and she released Stars Aligned that year. That record signaled the rise of a major voice in Nashville music, with the album’s “Freedom” a standout track. Her command of an idiom that manages to be both avant-garde and sleek shines through New Noise, which expresses the form of standard pop even as it dissolves it.
“I arrived at electronic music through this desire to have access to all the sounds on the spectrum — and more,” Maret says. “To be able to have that sort of creative control, and to be able to also discover new things along the way — I found it more challenging with acoustic instruments to make it transform in the way I wanted.”
Like Eno and Hassell at their best, Maret knows how to put across a simple melody that gradually undergoes a transformation. You can hear this on the New Noise track “For Sappho,” which ends up being just as catchy as the more rock-centric tracks on the album. Similarly, “Anima Rising” features a pattern that becomes a wash of sound.
Elsewhere on New Noise, erstwhile Nashvillians and current Chicago electronic music group Coupler contributes keys to “New Day,” a track Maret says she began working on in 2019. Maret adds clarinet to the title track, while album closer “My Body Speaks” works off a basic rock ’n’ roll chord structure. The concision of the tracks on New Noise speaks to Maret’s pop savvy, but the album is both introspective and pleasingly kinetic — as befits an artist who seeks to infuse expressive pop with a kind of interior logic that’s all their own.
“I’m someone with a lot of ideas, and I wanted to compose on my own. I love people. I’m a social person. But I’m also, you know, pretty introverted.”
