Emilie Kahn’s new album, Maybe, is a collection of shimmering, lovesick pop music, dispatched from the space between yes and no. Over 14 tracks, the Montreal musician oscillates from sunburned hopelessness to a quickening confidence, sharing vivid stories from the life + times of a singer with a five-foot harp and a heart full of desire.

A few years ago, Kahn decided to quit town. She had released two albums —the first in 2015 under the moniker Emilie & Ogden, and another under her own name, in 2019—toured with Half Moon Run, and earned accolades everywhere from The New York Times to KCRW and BBC 6Music. But it was a classic quarter-life crisis—imagining a perfect paradise waiting someplace else. Kahn packed everything, including her harp, into a boxy Mazda 5 and drove cross-country to Los Angeles. Everything would be easier there, Kahn was certain. She’d write songs, fall in love, and instantly, effortlessly, make it.

Unfortunately, LA's promise proved a mirage. As California sidled into a snowless, changeless winter, Kahn had had enough of its façades: she drove all the way back east, to her parents’ house in rural Ontario, and holed-up in-studio with her old friend Jean-Philippe Levac. She showed him the tracks she’d been saving up—songs about crushes, love-triangles, anxiety, and life as an artist—and soon they were recording music that was mature and confident, shimmering with a surprising new assurance. Kahn fully assumed her role as co-producer, shaping a sound that was stripped-back and natural, with a clearer focus on voice and harp. “I had arrived in this place where I had these really refined ideas about the sounds that I wanted,” she says, even if “the songs themselves were still full of self-doubt.”

The resulting album is at once laid-back and feverish, with a pop energy that recalls Arlo Parks, Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Del Rey, and Kahn’s viral affection for Taylor Swift. There are songs like “Moves” and “Julia,” teeming with desire, whereas others—like the gleaming closer, “Endless”—evoke the crying-and-palm-trees of Kahn’s time on the West Coat. “Search History,” Maybe’s irresistible lead single, is a portrait of obsession at its most luscious.

Throughout, Kahn’s uncertainty—about the present, the future, and the state of her heart—becomes an engine for some of the best tunes she’s ever laid to tape. “Maybe” isn’t always a cop-out, or even a hesitation: sometimes it’s pure and ravishing possibility.

Emilie Kahn

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