Eliza May’s “I’m Coming Home”

If you’ve been hearing more than a couple of good things about Eliza May’s music in recent years, you’re not alone. In her new single “I’m Coming Home” and its charming music video, both of which are out now and garnering attention from critics and new fans alike, May isn’t playing into the hands of a jaded popstar stereotype by any means. She’s not sexualizing her music for the sake of marketing to greasy label execs and cheap promotion schemes; she’s weaponized her words and loaded the backend of the mix with a club groove, the combination resulting in her most affirmative piece of music to see widespread release so far. 

May’s look as a songwriter in this performance is definitely really confident, but I don’t think she’s got the sort of swagger some would easily perceive as being arrogant. While she’s hoisting up shots like Kobe, there’s a reticence to impose a carnal command over the narrative in these lyrics – alluding to a subtle innocence I want her to utilize as much as she can in a harmony. She’s using melodic faceting to give up her soul to us here, and this kind of technique is not something you can simply practice into existence. 

Where some of her contemporaries would have shrunk from the sheer size of the hook here, May runs head-on into the chorus and embraces the challenging segue like it’s nothing at all. The tryst she starts with the beat at this juncture of “I’m Coming Home” reminds me a lot of Lorde, but without the fleeting sense of bitterness that frequently shadows many of her most provocative lyrical lashings. May is hitting every bar she needs to here, and best of all, she’s doing it with the assistance of zero plastic elements in the master mix behind her. 

The music video for “I’m Coming Home” is premium grade for sure, but not born of a stock pop anti-conceptualism that a lot of other indie acts would just as soon pick up when trying to take their sound out of the underground and into the spotlight of a mainstream stage.  I don’t think this is an artist who has it in her to sell-out the style of her music that simply; if this were true, I don’t believe we’d be getting the kind of vulnerability a song like this one is structured atop just to come into focus. 

Brilliantly well evolved but still a sample of a one of a kind style becoming as big an entity as it can be, Eliza May’s “I’m Coming Home” is a song that you really need to hear this year. Her voice is a draw no matter what she’s singing, but if you were hoping to hear something a bit more complicated both emotionally and compositionally as 2020 concludes, this could be just the song you need to hear right now. May is a treasure in this performance, and I hope it isn’t too long before she gets back at it with another sharp addition to her body of work. 

Mindy McCall