Gia Margaret caught my ear a few years ago, after she contracted a vocal illness that forced her to create instrumental music for her second album. I was mesmerized by the ambient track "Body" and the accompanying video.

Margaret just dropped a new album entitled Romantic Piano. It still follows a pattern of going light on the vocals. When it appears, her voice is treated almost like one of the other instruments.

After a long vocal hiatus following her illness in 2019, it is even clearer here that Margaret uses her voice as another instrument, a textured layer of warmth over sparse piano. “I can almost feel you,” she sings on an exhale as if the words spill out as merely a side effect of breathing.

On the track "La langue d'lamitié," a collaboration with Pedro The Lion's Dave Bazan, Margaret affects a sound that comes across as lo-fi with a bit more to ponder. The song ends with a sample concluding that music "is a language of feeling." Indeed.

For bonus points, check out this video of Margaret and her friend Zoya Zafar doing an accoustic stripped down cover of Slowdive's "Alison."