Moyka released Rear View earlier in th year and she started a new musical era for her. She released her second album Movies, Cars & Heartbreak on october, which also includes her subsequent singles.
Moyka dealing with the decline in the music industry and the effects of the pandemic after releasing her first album The Revelations of Love in 2021. And her new music era is lifting Moyka.
“It took a long time before I realised that I struggled with depression after releasing my first album. I’m a person who always just pushes through for better or for worse. Suddenly I found myself struggling with finding motivation and purpose – which is not like me at all. It felt like a period of grief and that was really hard to deal with when trying to be a positive person outwardly. I felt like I was outside of my body while things were just happening around me. I couldn’t take anything in and I was just sad all the time. That was really hard to deal with, and it also didn’t make me make good music!“
Moyka talks about the effects of the past few years in the lyrics of the song Perfect Movie Scene from the album;
“I’ve been through fire / I’ve been through cold / I’ve been here / I’ve been gone…”
A turning point of sorts came when Moyka had the revelation that she could just take her time. “It was a huge moment for me! I thought I had to keep going and keep pushing, almost conduct a war against myself – and then that hit me, that I could take time and let go of that pressure of thinking I have to be constantly releasing music. It was a huge shift in my perspective…and a few months after that I started having fun with music again. Now I feel really ready to share what I’ve been working on for so long!”
In terms of having fun with music, there was no singular revelatory moment for Moyka. Rediscovering her love of production and being in the studio – both alone and with collaborators – she found that songs would pop and appear from everywhere, from older pieces to new moments of inspiration and these fragments started to fit together into some sort of overall album concept.
“I remember last summer, that’s when I started to have fun” recalls Moyka. “There was this trip to Copenhagen where I was walking around the city alone in between writing songs with a few different producers. None of those songs made it on the album but I got sun on my face, and it felt like summer and I thought ‘this is what it feels like to be alive again!’ I felt the shift. And then later on in the summer, I think it was July, I went on a trip to Berlin to write. Always love writing in Berlin. I feel in the zone there, and I wrote ‘Never Say Sorry.’ I knew then that I had the album, that this was the turning point, and really, really fun.”
You might be able to tell from the title of the album but Movies, Cars & Heartbreak is indeed about movies, cars and heartbreak. Moyka loves to create concepts and work inside frames, almost creating a boundary around herself in order to fully immerse themselves inside it. On a plane after the trip to Berlin, Moyka found herself unable to sleep and so listened to the music she’d created so far. “I thought about the whole concept and figured out okay, this is actually an album we have here…and its theme is movies,” she explains. “The concept is about those moments in life that feel like a movie, you know? So, like, romanticising your life. When you listen to music and look out the bus window. It’s raining, the moment has that feeling. The last few songs came quickly after that and I was able to smack them on the album!”
Movies, Cars and Heartbreak is, from beginning to end, the sound of Moyka completely owning every aspect of the creation. Always one to embrace the sad banger, the album is the apex of this idea. The record opens with the filmic intro “Action” and ends on the beautiful outro “The End” but in between hits you with umpteen beats and melodies, the ones that pound alongside your heartbeat on the dancefloor or the ones that cause you to lean into the shoulder of a loved one in a fleeting, peaceful moment.
Enjoy listening!
