Mia Joy in a press photograph by Athena Merry
Mia Joy will release Star Echo Heavy Dove, her second album, on 15 January 2027 through Fire Talk. It is the follow-up to her 2021 debut, Spirit Tamer, and it arrives with a lead single and video, “Wings of Desire”, named after Wim Wenders’ 1987 film.
The biggest change is who is playing. Spirit Tamer was a collection of tracks largely defined by the Chicago musician and her loop pedal. Star Echo Heavy Dove is a full-band record, made with a circle of longtime collaborators, and it includes the first outside guest on one of her albums.
From a Loop Pedal to a Full Band
The label’s announcement draws the contrast directly. The collaborative, full-band nature of the new album “contrasts heavily” with Spirit Tamer, which it describes as “a moving collection of tracks that were largely defined by Joy and her loop pedal alone”.
To make the record, Mia Joy turned to what the press text calls her “familiar cast of characters”: Michael Macdonald on guitar, bass, organ and synth, Jack Berereton and Jordan Nelson on drums, Scott Rubin on viola and Michael Santana on electric guitar. “We have this very intimate knowingness,” she says of those longstanding relationships. “We just telepathically know what we like from each other.”
The songs have a long history. Star Echo Heavy Dove was recorded across sessions spanning years, and it was, in the label’s words, “mined from compositions covering the totality of Joy’s career”. Fire Talk says the album “closes a six-year orbital path” and calls it “a self-referential ode to artistic and spiritual resilience”.
The six years were not entirely silent. Between the two albums came the 2023 EP Celestial Mirror, Stereogum notes, but Star Echo Heavy Dove is her first full-length since Spirit Tamer was released on Fire Talk in May 2021.
Wings of Desire, a Song Named After a Wim Wenders Film
The lead single takes its title from Wenders’ 1987 film. The label calls it “an entrancing reflection on distance and longing” and the album’s centrepiece, a song about desire, limerence and what is lost or gained in the pursuit of romance.
“Seeing Wenders’ film for the first time helped me move internal static to words,” Mia Joy says. She describes it as “one of those seminal moments in life where what you’re watching mirrors life so dearly my only way to resolve myself was to write this song”.
“I’m gravitated to lonely characters, solitude, longing,” she continues. “One of Star Echo Heavy Dove’s motifs is centered around balancing the tug of war between feeling satisfaction with being self-sufficient and the willingness to give that up for the vulnerability of expanding desire. There’s a great message in there about living for all that life offers, letting yourself go even if you end up bleeding.”
The video, directed by Jordan Nelson, nods to her love of the film and collects footage of Joy with her friends and bandmates around their home base of Chicago, according to Dork and the press release published by FEMMUSIC. As Stereogum points out, the single is now one of three things called “Wings of Desire”, alongside the film and a British indie rock duo of the same name.
Circle, and the First Guest on a Mia Joy Album
“Circle” is the first track on one of her albums to feature an outside guest: Madeline Johnston, who records as Midwife. “Like Author, Like Daughter saved my life. It was one of those moments where you hear something and you’re a fan for life,” Joy says of her introduction to Midwife, which began with the two artists sharing a stage in 2018.
The song came out of a change in direction. In the late autumn and early winter of 2024, Joy began exploring her own affinity for slower, noisier rock, and “it didn’t feel right not having Madeline on it,” she says. “I just said ‘please,’ and she said ‘duh,’ and we did it.” The label says the result is anchored by Midwife’s signature guitar drones and vocals.
Johnston is the album’s only guest, Stereogum notes. Mia Joy has worked with others outside the record: in September she released “Comet”, featuring Peel Dream Magazine, but that song will not appear on Star Echo Heavy Dove.
“Comet” is worth hearing anyway. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan described it as “a slow, twinkly blissout that sounds a bit like Stereolab covering the Sundays, or like Cat Power joining the High Llamas”. Peel Dream Magazine’s Joe Stevens said he first saw her play at Lodge Room in Los Angeles, where he used to work, before they played together at Chicago’s Empty Bottle, and that they “worked on this remotely, sending stems back and forth”.
Library CDs, Record Shops and a Madonna Reference
Mia Joy’s references run deep. Fire Talk traces her “crate-digging curiosity” back to adolescent hours spent borrowing CDs from the library and ripping them to her home computer. “It’s a gorgeous socialist system,” she says of those library visits, which led her to Brian Eno, Neu! and Todd Rundgren, among others. Through her 20s she has worked in record shops, spending her days combing through the bins.
That listening shows in how the two albums differ. The label describes Spirit Tamer as “a Grouper-indebted dreampop foray propelled by a penchant for Arthur Russell”, while Star Echo Heavy Dove taps into sophisti-pop sounds, breakbeat drums and “slyly Beatles-esque melodies”. The Arthur Russell connection was explicit on the debut, which closed with one of his songs, “Last Night Together”, according to its Bandcamp credits.
Joy names one very specific touchstone. “I was thinking ‘Frozen’ by Madonna,” she says, describing a sound that was “very tranquil but also electronic and layered”. It is an unexpected reference for an artist first filed under dream pop, and a useful clue to how different the new record is likely to sound.
The Star Echo Heavy Dove Tracklist
The album has ten songs, according to Stereogum:
- Star Echo / Heavy Dove
- 4th Of July
- Midnight
- Wings Of Desire
- Yes You Can
- Easier
- Circle (feat. Midwife)
- Patience
- West
- Saturn II
“Wings of Desire” sits fourth and “Circle” seventh. The record opens with its title track, written with a slash that splits the title in two, and closes with “Saturn II”.
Back Where She Started
Fire Talk frames the album as a return, with Mia Joy coming back “to where she started” to see how far she has come and “to explore where else she can go this time around”. The label adds that the album is “made all the better by her time away”.
The tracklist carries a thread back to the debut. Spirit Tamer included a song called “Saturn”, which its Bandcamp page says is written in the voice of the planet of “restriction, isolation, responsibility, hard lessons”. Star Echo Heavy Dove closes with “Saturn II”.
Joy’s own summary is plainer. Looking back on the years since her debut, she puts it simply: “life is still really hard, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Pre-orders are open now, and Fire Talk’s store lists vinyl and CD editions, a 2LP bundle and deluxe vinyl and CD bundles. Records built from years of material are a theme this autumn: over 100 songs became the 11 on Remi Wolf’s Mud. For Mia Joy, the wait ends on 15 January, six years after Spirit Tamer.
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