Colle

Colle is a fascinating piece in an emerging and amorphous puzzle of international sound, where the anxiety of modern existence is blanketed by nostalgic echoes of the past. The project of Chanel Beads member Maya McGrory, Colle emerged in the summer of 2024 with a string of beguiling singles on the London imprint urtruimage. Those songs—“Silent But For Joy” and “Green Edge”—surrounded Colle’s ethereal and broad voice with the trappings of early 4AD and trip-hop masterpieces, disjointed drums bobbing in seas of synths and vaporized guitars. Released late in 2024 to critical acclaim, her debut, Montalvo, affirmed that hazy vision. Songs like “Day You Told Me” and “Winter Garden” hinged on a painterly approach to texture and a poet’s perspective on feeling, longing and wistfulness tucked inside a few lines.

The songs of Montalvo were inspired by Colle’s memories of her childhood home on Montalvo Road. They radiate a bittersweet tenderness for the past, a longing for innocence interlocked with an awareness that to feel that way forever is to surrender any sense of real growth. Like Maria Somerville or Joanne Robertson, she is a descendant of Grouper, letting her songs fade beguilingly into the distance like remembrance itself. Onstage, Colle sings and plays along to her digital soundscapes, surrounded by rudimentary 3D projections, as if still searching for that long-ago home.