Maya Hawke calls 'Dark' a 'Cut and Dry' song About New Love

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

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

The video opens with black-and-white footage of a man in a dark suit delivering a monologue while a roomful of people, including Hawke, gathers around him. The scene then cuts to the singer in color as the tempo picks up and she twirls and wraps herself in strands of yellow and red ribbon. “We're trying to wait the night out/We're trying to keep the light out/We've only got the moon left to get through/But we can't will ourselves out of the dark,” Hawk sings 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 messy history and pain that two people bring to 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 period of anxiety before bed.” He continued, “I lay in bed afraid that if I let myself sleep, my brain would forget how to breathe and I would die in my sleep. I saw a doctor who told me I needed to become okay with death. He said that if I accepted it, I could sleep and probably… I wouldn't die. He was right, I didn't die. And I wrote this song to celebrate.”

Chaos Angel will feature 10 songs, during which Hawke “records twists, revelations, weaknesses, and broken promises, all while navigating the patterns we repeat as we grow, wander, and find our way back to some basic understanding of ourselves.”