Maya (stylised in all caps; or as ΛΛ Λ Y Λ and /\/\ /\ Y /\) is the third studio album by British recording artist M.I.A. It was released on 7 July 2010 through N.E.E.T. Recordings, XL and Interscope. Songwriting and production was primarily handled by M.I.A., Blaqstarr and Rusko. Producers Diplo and Switch, alongside M.I.A.'s brother Sugu, also worked on the album. Maya was mainly composed and recorded at M.I.A.'s house in Los Angeles. The album's tracks centre on the theme of information politics and are intended to evoke what M.I.A. called a "digital ruckus"; elements of industrial music were incorporated into M.I.A.'s sound for the first time upon its release. A deluxe edition was released simultaneously, featuring four new tracks.
Upon its release, Maya received mixed to positive reviews from music critics, with the album's musical style and lyrical content attracting both praise and criticism. In its first week of release, the album entered the UK Albums Chart at number 21, becoming her highest-charting album in the UK. It also became her highest-charting album in the US, peaking at number nine on the Billboard 200. Elsewhere, the album debuted in the top 10 in Finland, Norway, Greece and Canada.
To promote the album, M.I.A. released multiple tracks online, including "XXXO", "It Takes a Muscle" and "Born Free". The latter was accompanied by a short film-music video, which generated controversy due to its graphic imagery. She also performed at music festivals in the US and Europe to coincide with the album release. During promotion of the album, M.I.A. became embroiled in a dispute with Lynn Hirschberg of The New York Times.
Composition and recording
English-Tamil musician M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) released her second album Kala in 2007, which achieved widespread critical acclaim, and was certified gold in the United States and silver in the United Kingdom. Enter Kala in the field Search. Select Title in the field Search by. Select album in the field By Format. Click Go Six months after giving birth to her son Ikyhd in February 2009, she began composing and recording her third studio album in a home studio section of the Los Angeles house she had bought with her partner Ben Bronfman. She used instruments such as the portable dynamic-phrase synthesizer Korg Kaossilator to compose. She took the beat machine and began recording atop Mayan pyramids in Mexico. Much of the work on the album was undertaken at her house in Los Angeles, in what she called a "commune environment", before it was completed in a rented studio in Hawaii. She collaborated with writer-producer Blaqstarr because, in her opinion, "he simply makes good music". M.I.A.'s collaboration with Derek E. Miller of Sleigh Bells on the track "Meds and Feds" prompted her subsequent signing of the band to her label N.E.E.T., and according to Miller, this experience gave him the confidence to record the band's debut album Treats.
Her creative partnership with the relatively unknown Rusko grew from a sense of frustration at what she saw as her now more mainstream associates suggesting sub-standard tracks due to their busy schedules. Diplo worked on the track "Tell Me Why", but at a studio in Santa Monica, California, rather than at the house. He claimed in an interview that, following the break-up of his personal relationship with M.I.A. some years earlier, he was not allowed to visit the house because "her boyfriend really hates me".
Tracks for the album were whittled down from recording sessions lasting up to 30 hours. Producer Rusko, who played guitar and piano on the album, described the pair getting "carried away" in the studio, appreciating the "mad distorted and hectic" sound they were able to create. Rusko said "She's got a kid, a little one year old baby, and we recorded his heart beat. We'd just think of crazy ideas". Rusko has described M.I.A. as the best artist he has ever worked with, saying that she had "been the most creative and I really had a good time making music with her".
Music and lyrics M.I.A. called the new project "schizophrenic", and spoke of the Internet inspiration that could be found in the songs and the artwork. She also said that the album centred on her "not being able to leave [Los Angeles] for 18 months" and feeling "disconnected". She summed up the album's main theme as information politics. During the recording of the album, she spoke of the combined effects that news corporations and Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need to ascertain truth. Maya was made to be "so uncomfortably weird and wrong that people begin to exercise their critical-thinking muscles". M.I.A. said "You can Google 'Sri Lanka' and it doesn't come up that all these people have been murdered or bombed, it's 'Come to Sri Lanka on vacation, there are beautiful beaches' ... you're not gonna get the truth till you hit like, page 56, and it's my and your responsibility to pass on the information that it's not easy anymore". Following these comments, M.I.A. received death threats directed at her and her son, which she also cited as an influence on the songs on the album. She summed up the album as a mixture of "babies, death, destruction and powerlessness". The singer revealed that going into recording the album, she had still not accepted that she was a musician, saying, "I'm still in denial, listening to too much Destiny's Child". With Maya, she stated "I was happy being the retarded cousin of rap... Now I'm the retarded cousin of singing."
M.I.A. opted to sing, as opposed to rap, on several tracks on the album, telling Rolling Stone in early 2010 that she wished to produce something different from her previous album, which had "more emphasis on production". In a January 2010 interview with NME she spoke of being inspired by the film Food, Inc. and described the album as being about "exploring our faults and flaws" and being proud of them. The closing track, "Space", which was reportedly recorded using an iPhone app, is a ballad which Mikael Wood, writing in Billboard, described as "dreamy" and "sound[ing] like a Sega Genesis practicing its pillow talk". In contrast, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune described "Lovalot" as sounding "like it was recorded in a dank alley, the singer's voice reverberating amid percussion that sounds like doors creaking and rats scurrying across garbage cans". "XXXO" draws its inspiration from M.I.A.'s "cheesy pop side", and is based on the theme of the creation of a sex symbol. "Teqkilla" is the only track to address her relationship with Bronfman, through a reference to Seagram, the company owned by his family. "It Takes a Muscle" is a cover version of a track originally recorded in 1982 by Dutch group Spectral Display, and is performed in a reggae style.
The opening track "The Message", featuring a male lead vocalist, parodies the words of the traditional song "Dem Bones" to link Google to "the government". Kitty Empire wrote in The Observer that these conspiratorial government connections to Google and the thoughts of Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the Russian teenager who bombed Moscow's tube system in revenge for the death of her husband, were inner-world issues pondered in "Lovalot" with "a mixture of nonsense rhyme, militant posturing and pop-cultural free-flow; her London glottal stop mischievously turns 'I love a lot' into 'I love Allah' ". Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times said that "M.I.A. turns a call to action into a scared girl's nervous tic. Synths click out a jittery, jagged background. The song doesn't justify anything, but it reminds us that there is a person behind every lit fuse". Powers also commented on how "Born Free" mixed the boasting style often found in hip hop music with lines depicting the lives of those enduring poverty and persecution. "Illygirl", a track found only on the deluxe edition of the album, is written from the point of view of an abused but tough teenager, whom critic Robert Christgau said could be the "kid-sister-in-metaphor" of the swaggering persona adopted by M.I.A. on the track "Steppin Up".
Samples used on the album were taken from artists as diverse as the electronic duo Suicide and gospel choir the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. "Internet Connection", one of four bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of the album, was recorded in collaboration with a group of Filipino Verizon workers. M.I.A. described the sound and imagery of the album as capturing a "digital ruckus", adding that "so many of us have become typists and voyeurs". We need a digital moshpit like we've never seen, harder than how people were doing it in the punk era. We need that energy, but digitally". M.I.A. herself picked out "Steppin Up", "Space" and "Teqkilla" as her favourite tracks on the album. She said that she contemplated using only the sound of drills as the backing for "Steppin Up", but concluded that this was "too experimental" an approach.
According to Jim Farber of New York Daily News, Maya is an avant-pop album that takes influence from "the most maddeningly catchy bits of electro-clash, hip-hop, Bollywood, dub and dance music". Farber also noted the significant industrial rock influence on the album, likening it to "the late-'80s work of Ministry". Julianne Escobedo Shepherd of The Fader commented on the increasingly industrial feel of the tracks made available prior to the album's release, a style which had not previously been incorporated into her music. On a similar note, Michael Saba of Paste believed the album was "a collection of sparse, industrial-influenced tracks that sound more like post-apocalyptic Nine Inch Nails than Arulpragasam’s trademark realpolitik rap".
Release and artwork The album was originally set to be released on 29 June 2010, but in May M.I.A.'s record label announced a new release date of 13 July. In late April, the artist posted a twitpic of the track listing for the new album. She also commented that at the time she was "open to suggestions" regarding the album's title. Two weeks later, a blog posting on her record label's official website revealed that the album would be entitled /\/\/\Y/\, which spells out M.I.A.'s own forename, Maya, in leetspeak. The title follows on from previous albums named after her father (2005's Arular) and mother (2007's Kala). Some reviewers used the stylised title while others did not. M.I.A.'s official Myspace page uses both titles. The album was released in conventional physical and digital formats and as an iTunes LP.
The album's cover features the singer's face almost completely hidden by YouTube player bars. MTV's Kyle Anderson described the cover, which was previewed in June 2010, as "a typically busy, trippy, disorienting piece of art" and speculated that it might be "a statement about 21st century privacy". Additional art direction for the album was provided by Aaron Parsons. M.I.A. used her mother's Tamil phonebook to find a wedding photographer to provide images for the album. Photographers for the album were Ravi Thiagaraja, M.I.A. and Jamie Martinez. Elements of the artwork had previously been used in one of a series of billboard images, all designed by musicians, which were projected onto landmarks in London by a guerrilla project called BillBored during the 2010 British general election. The deluxe edition of the album features a lenticular slipcase. Music website Prefix listed it as one of the 10 worst album covers of 2010, likening it to a "child's first computer-class-assignment".