ALBUM REVIEW: Mayshe-Mayshe – Mosswood

Released: 26.10.25

Delightful understated hooks, deployed with a delicate featherweight touch… Layered vocals and looped beats, crafted with deftness and ingenuity… Luscious and intimate production values, perfectly crystalline and determinedly lo-fi… These are the fundamentals familiar listeners will anticipate from a new Mayshe-Mayshe project, and on the face of it York alt-pop artist Alice Rowan’s latest delivers in abundance. Even so, Mosswood stands apart from predecessors Cocoa Smoke (2019) and Indigo (2022), not only in representing the most beautiful Mayshe-Mayshe record to date, but also in its vividly realised conceptual surround. Moreover, these songs aren’t grounded in any old mossy woodland – rather, they’re an extension of the quaint fantasy world depicted in Tove Jansson’s final Moomin novels, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November.

This unsullied hinterland is rendered via a honed and expanded sonic palette, where trademark mellow synths and sumptuous melodies are augmented by the introduction of field recordings. Far from tagged-on window-dressing, these found sounds infuse a sense of place and pastoral agelessness – witness the tranquil trickle of running water enriching lead single Mycelium, or the gentle patter of rain soundtracking acoustic rumination Creature.

It’s a world of idyllic wonder which invites restfulness as much as sharp engagement – and crucially is underscored by Rowan’s most profound writing to date. Delving deeper, it becomes clear Mosswood isn’t merely a place for escapism, but one of solace from the trials of loneliness, anxiety and loss affecting in our material reality. “I’m so so sick of feeling so ill at ease / I’m so sick of feeling I’m sweet and serene,” Rowan bemoans on the suitably eerie and restless Tiny Disasters. Inner turmoil is hardly without precedent in the Mayshe-Mayshe songbook, yet this unguardedness does as much as any sonic flourish to furnish an authentic and immersive dreamscape.

Gorgeous standout Island Garden extends further still, confiding “I know that I am not designed for this unkind and violent life / I hide inside my guarded mind / I want a softer kind of life,” while The Little Things (Moss Mix) – a reworking of early Cocoa Smoke favourite Mymble on the Little Things – assimilates seamlessly with its blissed-out ode to the cleansing joys of the natural world. Unfurling alongside those sonic details upon repeat listens, Mosswood’s emotional beats perhaps lack the immediacy of previous Mayshe-Mayshe projects – yet there’s a depth of feeling and imagination here which makes their discovery all the more rewarding. Moomin aficionado or otherwise, its soundworld is a pleasure to lose yourself within.