MAY-A

MAY-A’s best move has always been to treat pop like a diary entry with proper drums. The Sydney-born songwriter (real name Maya Cumming) came up posting covers online, then turned that early internet momentum into a run of songs that feel specific enough to sting, and catchy enough to travel.

On Mood on the Roof, she pulls out two tracks from the early wave that put her on people’s radar: Apricots and Time I Love to Waste. Apricots landed as her fourth release, a song written from the headspin of early self-discovery, made with the kind of polish that suggested she’d been doing this far longer than she had.

By the time Time I Love to Waste arrived, MAY-A was doubling down on the fact that her songs can be light on their feet while still saying something real. She has spoken about how those releases pulled a lot of interview attention toward her sexuality, sometimes overshadowing the broader point: she’s an artist building her own lane, in real time.

From there, she stitched those early singles into her debut EP Don’t Kiss Ur Friends, released in 2021, with “Apricots” and “Time I Love to Waste” sitting in the same autobiographical thread. In interviews around the EP, she framed those songs as part of one relationship narrative, written across her late teens as life sped up around her. The project also put her on the ARIA radar early, picking up a Michael Gudinski Breakthrough Artist nomination.

Then came the moment that pushed her from rising name to household feature. In February 2022, Flume tapped her for “Say Nothing”, the lead single for Palaces, and it became the kind of crossover hit that changes your scale overnight. In January 2023, “Say Nothing” took out triple j’s Hottest 100 of 2022, giving MAY-A a rare badge: voice of the biggest song in the country, without having to sand down what made her interesting in the first place. The track also scored major ARIA nominations off the back of its run.