Maya Hawke Releases ‘Dark,’ a ‘Cut and Dry’ Song About Love

Maya Hawke details her anxiety and its overwhelming nature in her latest single, “Dark.”

Accompanied with a video upon its release, the song follows last month’s “Missing Out,” with both reflective tracks offering insight into her upcoming album, Chaos Angel, due May 31. The new track is billed as a “more intimate side” of the LP, “detailing times in Maya’s life where anxiety threatened to fully consume her.”

The video begins with black-and-white footage of a man in a dark suit delivering a monologue while a room full of people, Hawke included, gather around him. The scene then cuts to the singer in full color as the tempo lifts and she twirls and wraps herself in strands of yellow and red ribbon. “We try to wait the night out/Try to keep the light out/We’ve only the moon left to outsmart/ But We cannot want our way out of the dark,” sings Hawke on the track.

In a press release, Hawke called “Dark” a “cut and dry love song about a relationship struggling to find its footing.” She explained, “It’s about trying to sort out the mixed bag of history and pain two people bring into a new love to find the path forward.”

When discussing the chorus, the artist recalled that it was “written a few years ago when I was going through a particularly debilitating bout of bedtime anxiety.” She continued, “I would lay in bed with the fear that if I let myself fall asleep, my brain would forget how to breathe and I would die in my sleep. I saw a doctor who told me that I had to become okay with dying. He said if I accepted it, I would be able to sleep and would likely … not die. He was right, I didn’t die. And I wrote this song to celebrate it.”

Chaos Angel will feature 10 songs, during which Hawke “catalogs upheavals, revelations, foibles, and broken promises, all while navigating the patterns we repeat while growing older, wandering astray, and finding our way back to some core understanding of ourselves.”

Maya Hawke details her anxiety and its overwhelming nature in her latest single, “Dark.”

Accompanied with a video upon its release, the song follows last month’s “Missing Out,” with both reflective tracks offering insight into her upcoming album, Chaos Angel, due May 31. The new track is billed as a “more intimate side” of the LP, “detailing times in Maya’s life where anxiety threatened to fully consume her.”

The video begins with black-and-white footage of a man in a dark suit delivering a monologue while a room full of people, Hawke included, gather around him. The scene then cuts to the singer in full color as the tempo lifts and she twirls and wraps herself in strands of yellow and red ribbon. “We try to wait the night out/Try to keep the light out/We’ve only the moon left to outsmart/ But We cannot want our way out of the dark,” sings Hawke on the track.

In a press release, Hawke called “Dark” a “cut and dry love song about a relationship struggling to find its footing.” She explained, “It’s about trying to sort out the mixed bag of history and pain two people bring into a new love to find the path forward.”

When discussing the chorus, the artist recalled that it was “written a few years ago when I was going through a particularly debilitating bout of bedtime anxiety.” She continued, “I would lay in bed with the fear that if I let myself fall asleep, my brain would forget how to breathe and I would die in my sleep. I saw a doctor who told me that I had to become okay with dying. He said if I accepted it, I would be able to sleep and would likely … not die. He was right, I didn’t die. And I wrote this song to celebrate it.”

Chaos Angel will feature 10 songs, during which Hawke “catalogs upheavals, revelations, foibles, and broken promises, all while navigating the patterns we repeat while growing older, wandering astray, and finding our way back to some core understanding of ourselves.”