Cyrena Wages already captured our attention and imagination with 2024’s Vanity Project. Her second album, Miss Melancholia, is a more assured collection that her many existing fans will love, and will certainly widen her appeal. She dropped in at the Vibes HQ to chat about the new album and much else. This is the first thing she said to us, and it went downhill from here: “I'm very particular about the vessels in which I consume my vices.”
Album reviews are my favourite thing to write. I started listening to music when the album was the most significant way to buy music. That idea really took off in the 1970s. Deep into the ‘60s, bands were still releasing one-off standalone singles. The music album is really the longform version of music. The name suggests that the songs follow a theme.
Sometimes it is more of a collage than a single picture. Some themes carry an artist through the decades, appearing on every album, and some themes are introduced and dropped again during one record. Working out which is which is a fun part of the reviewer’s role. Is this a new direction for Cyrena Wages, a detour, an evolution? I can’t tell you definitively. And that’s where the fun begins.
If you have been following CW’s journey for a while, you will know that she had a Nashville-style country career in various bands, all of which were successful on their own terms. But it was when Cyrena returned home to Memphis and became a solo artist for the first time that I believe she truly found herself.
Today’s release, Miss Melancholia, with or without its exclamation mark, is an important clue. Much of the darkness, the introspection and the anger of her debut album, Vanity Project, is still present. The debut was especially rooted in place, in a very specific part of not only Tennessee but north Memphis. It was hyper local in that sense, but you didn’t really need to have heard of Millington or Shelby County or the rivers and the surrounding countryside. I could barely find Tennessee on a map. Those songs were deeply personal coming-of-age stories from the artist’s life that covered such universal topics that they spoke to anyone who appreciates music. We can talk about genre later, if we must, but I should warn you that nobody has ever done better than this: Memphis Winehouse. Or Elvis Winehouse.
This is how CW described the progression:
“I think sonically and lyrically Miss Melancholia came out differently because I was in such a different season. But no, I didn't consciously try to have a departure of any kind. Of course, when you work with different people, there's a built-in departure, too. But it wasn't a conscious pivot.”
If Vanity Project was a bleeding wound then Miss Melancholia is the inevitable scar. Still itchy, still visible, but no longer bleeding. Perhaps melancholy is what always comes after the anger has subsided. Perhaps we should just shut up and listen.
Proceedings kick off with Wildflower. There were many months when I only had demos of these tracks, but Wildflower stood out at an early stage. When I eventually got to posting a review, I knew that it was one of CW’s special ones. Once she admitted that, it became a sort of treasure hunt / mystery to solve. Why was that so?
In a room full of daisies I’ve always felt more like a weed
I’ll fight you for something I don’t even know I believe
They’ll call me crazy, unhinged, fucking wild but but they keep calling me
When you’re finally alone with yourself you’ll miss the chaos of my company
Wildflower is quite serious. It is a song of contradictions: a song about a genuinely wild and tempestuous person who is also fragile. It is no surprise that this song has been popular in sync catalogs and will be blasting out of your favourite streaming service next year. CW told me that back in 2015, when she was in a band called Friends of Lola, their song Kissed Me Like Thunder appeared in a Robert Redford movie called A Walk in the Woods. It is brilliant and still available on streaming.
Best Behavior is up next. This was the first song of 2026. Then Daytrippin was the song I reviewed most recently, in hot July.
Love Letters
Wherever I go there the hell I am
I am a black widow, in a wedding dress
I got a heart of gold but it’s paying debt
I roll your love letters into cigarettes
Next up are two songs that have never appeared as singles: Love Letters and the title track, Miss Melancholia. When I saw Daytrippin in the track list I thought it was going to be light. Don’t make that mistake on Love Letters. It features a black widow in a wedding dress and evokes the old-time American West. It sounds as dry as the desert.
The image of the bride in a black dress makes an appearance in the video of Hate Yourself. Southern Gothic suicide. A reference again to being on your best behavior? This is one of the most explicit references to the bible belt beauty pageant culture that occupied much of Cyrena’s teen years. Making cigarettes out of love letters. Trying to please everyone in her life except herself. Parents, men. The other girls. And slow too. Love Letters is becoming one of my favourite tracks of all. This character doesn’t evoke sympathy as much as fear in the listener. It feels like her many hardships have hardened her edge. Beware.
CW had this to say about Love Letters, the first song she wrote for the album:
“One that I’m really excited for everyone to hear is Love Letters. No one’s heard that yet. I played it like once at a live show over a year ago, but no one’s heard the track. It’s one that I’m really proud of. It’s one of the most cinematic tracks on the record. I'm proud of the lyrics and I'm proud of the energy behind it and the vocal delivery and Johnny Black absolutely killed the track and it's like its whole own world. So, I'm really excited about that one.”
Miss Melancholia
Miss Melancholia the song brings more of a rock ‘n’ roll feel with prominent drums. It starts out like a 1990s Tom Petty song. The Madonna references were a pleasant surprise. We’re still in the world of prom dresses and cigarettes and she is still eating boys for breakfast.
A writer never knows which words will land, and sometimes you just need to keep writing to find out. But I do know that Cyrena liked my line about her having more balls than any man in America. Love Letters brought the idea of the black widow, and for some reason I began to associate this album with arachnids.
In photos, many Gen Z artists have come to specialise in very blank facial expressions. No smile, no frown. Just flat and neutral. Cyrena’s millennial specialty is the opposite: enormous fake grins, fixed on by rigor mortis. Smiling for the cameras even if you feel miserable. Both are David Lynch trademarks, and both are utterly terrifying. You know the beauty queen has learned how to smile, from a book or a YouTube tutorial, and her smile is not authentic. It is always performative.
Wilted roses on my window
Like the lovers I left dry
Voodoo doll up on my dashboard
You take a needle with a smile
How do we feel after Side A? Ready for more? A strange feature of the entertainment business is that we are just starting to listen to Miss Melancholia at the very moment when the artist is turning focus to album three. Back in the ‘60s bands were allowed three or four albums to learn their craft and figure out who they are and what they wanted to say. That might feel like a luxury today, but it mirrors Cyrena’s career in some ways. I think she has found herself now and she knows who she is not. The journey might have seemed long at the time but every gas stop held an important lesson.
I will never understand why happy poppy songs tend to sell better than truthful, dark and atmospheric ones. IYKYK that the darkness more accurately captures the world as it is rather than as we would hope it to be when we’re fourteen.
Vanity Project was written by a single girl in her late 20s and is full of worry about the future as much as anger about the past. Miss Melancholia, by contrast, contains a lot of bridal and wedding imagery. The girl has become the adult woman, and a wife. I might have joked in a previous article that even Frankenstein had his bride. Could the third album be about raising a family? Can I imagine anything more Charles Addams? Would CW be the coolest mom in Memphis? I have no answers to any of this but I will give you a few days to listen to these five songs before we hear Side B.
You can stream Miss Melancholia in all the usual places, but why would you? Vinyl pre-orders are now live here. Tennessee folks can see the album launch party IRL at Hernando’s Hide-A-Way on Nov 14.
