Chicago-based artist Gia Margaret announces her new album, Singing, out April 24th via Jagjaguwar, and shares the lead single/video, ‘Everyone Around Me Dancing.’
In this single, we find the narrator watching a party from the wings, aware of how her body keeps her from communal joy while also providing new modes of self-knowledge. “‘Everyone Around Me Dancing’ is a reflection on feeling isolated and the comfort found in that isolation,” explains Margaret. “It is for taking a pause, for being in observation of a very scary and loud world and it is for finding stillness in our own inner worlds too.”
Watch the video for ‘Everyone Around Me Dancing’
Praise for Gia Margaret
“One of our most-daring and interesting songwriters.” — Paste
“Margaret looks beyond the environment and into something more holy; reaching out, seeking some kind of intervention.” — The FADER
“Gia Margaret is responsible for some of the most arrestingly beautiful and delicate music of recent years” — FLOOD
Every artist has to discover their voice. Gia Margaret didn’t find herself until she lost hers. With a vocal injury that kept her from singing for years, she developed other musical languages, mastering the grammar of an intricate, homey form of ambient music pioneered by Ernest Hood and perfected by The Books. The two largely instrumental albums the Chicago pianist and composer made at that time—2020’s Mia Gargaret and 2023’s Romantic Piano—allowed her to lose herself in the emotional possibilities of pure sound. Now, her physical voice healed and her artistic voice honed, she comes full circle with Singing, her first vocal album since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer. Led by soft piano lines that fall like breath on glass, the music on Singing evidences the same jeweller’s sensitivity to detail that she developed in her silence.
Romantic Piano demonstrated Margaret’s ability to fold seemingly conflicting emotions around one another in origami melodies—the album’s ‘Hinoki Wood’ went viral on TikTok for the way it suggested looking back fondly at innocence from a place of experience. Singing is no less evocative, thanks to Margaret’s gifts as both a producer and a composer. As in a proper natural garden, every sound has been set carefully in place without sacrificing its individual vitality. Its songs are instantly recognisable and accessible as traditional pop, but they’ve also been shaped by the rules of ambient music, unrolling in a sanctified drift of intuition.
“There was a time when I really didn’t know if I would sing again. So once I healed, there was a lot of internal pressure to come back strong,” Margaret says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. So it felt like beginning again, and reconnecting with these very old, old parts of myself.”
Singing was recorded in London, Eau Claire, and Chicago in 2024 and 2025, alongside Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, David Bazan, Amy Millan, Deb Talan, Kurt Vile, and Sean Carey. Margaret’s longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman plays on and co-produces much of the record. “A lot of me meeting some of these collaborators (now my friends) fell completely into my lap,” she reflects. “Almost as if they could hear something in me that I’m certain was influenced by them in the first place.” But, as she says, all of her attempts to open her music to other artists “did lead me back to myself, because I realized I really do like producing. I felt like I was missing out by not exploring those things on my own.”
Gia Margaret is always singing. Every note of this album sings a warm requiem to her past selves; every layer sings her future self into being. Across the album, she applies the lessons of speechlessness—the quasirational ways we communicate without communicating, the way formless sound can cut to the heart of things like a scalpel—to her own artistic voice. “It’s a little woo-woo,” she says, “but I felt my throat chakra opening as the process of making the record went on. By the time I got to ‘E-Motion,’ the last song, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the end of whatever cycle this is. And I’m ready to move forward.”
Gia Margaret
Singing
Tracklist
- Everyone Around Me Dancing
- Cellular Reverse
- Alive Inside
- Moon Not Mine
- Rotten
- Rotten Outro
- Good Friend
- Phenomenon
- Ambient for Ichiko
- Phone Screen
- Guitar Duo
- E-Motion
