Irish artist MayKay (Fight Like Apes) – releases wise, witty and razor sharp new single ‘Busted’ from her self titled debut album

Best known as the fearless frontwoman of Fight Like Apes and later a member of electro heavyweights Le Galaxie, MayKay’s debut solo work finds her distilling years of collaboration into something wise, witty and truly her own. Slinky, spaced-out, and driven by a hypnotic thud, Busted is a series of short, sleazy stories carrying a razor-sharp message:

“Be honest with yourselves and more importantly, with your boys. Talk to your boys. Please.”

“People with bad intentions will always try to complicate the issue of consent,” says MayKay. “But it’s not complicated. Do you want women to trust you or not?”

The track was sparked when MayKay saw long-time friend Ian McFarlane (Squarehead, Tieranniesaur, Cruel Sister, Mik Pyro, Anamoe Drive) playing lap steel on Instagram. “That moment unlocked all this music for me,” she recalls. After years of holding back in favour of collaboration, MayKay embraced a stripped-back, self-
led approach for her debut album. The result is a sound that, in her words, “finally sounds like me.”

“I’ve always thought that music can send messages that can’t be sent any other way.”

How do you make a record about relationships? Relationships of all kinds? Romantic, familial, and the relationship one has to the self? It all has to start with honesty. Strip everything away – every expectation, semblance of pressure, any concept of the end result. This is the self-titled debut album by MayKay released on GrainStore Records. It’s a record that has sat in its own liminal gestation, completed four years ago, and only now urging its way towards being shared, the time has come for others to hear it. And hear it they will. This nine-track record is a charm bracelet of genres, crossing country, pop, new wave, and more. Writing quietly in what was her father’s grain store of his farm in Kildare, and still processing the grief of his death, and unpicking complications of other relationships in her life, the songs flowed quickly, a rapid expression of the travails of relationships building, falling apart, and maintaining. Unburdened by expectations, and free to upturn them, a new musical integrity emerged.

To celebrate the launch of the album MayKay will be performing a live show in Whelans in Dublin on 18th December.