maehem99 releases new single ‘Burn Your Wishes

Maehem99 leads you by the hand into the club, plunged into an anonymous dark blinkered by piercing strobe light. Their voice gleams like all beautiful things, an almost saintly devotion to reaching pop’s highest ideal – but the beats are fallen and filthy; hedonistic floor-fillers to cloud the mind and make the blood rush in the vein of FKA Twigs and Arca. Equal parts dream and nightmare, today they release their euphoric alt-pop wonder ‘Burn Your Wishes’ which untangles a complicated queer connection under the pressure of a career based on selling your image.

Maehem99 will be releasing their debut EP Sexual Commerce later this year. The five-track project is an intensely human document drawn from alienating experience. It untangles Maehem99’s career as a fashion model and the insidious spiral into the nightlife industry; the art of the image, the rot it conceals and the identity it redefines.

Mae was with the song’s muse on a trip to Taiwan; they fought constantly, stressed by the circumstances of their own lives. It was the night of the Lion’s Gate Portal – one of the most powerful events in the astrological calendar for manifestation – and they decided to write their wishes for the coming year. With only half an hour remaining, running out of time, they sat beside a gutter in Taipei and set the paper alight. “Mine burnt beautifully, but her wishes weren’t lighting. As I took it and tried to light hers, I accidentally knocked her wishes into a sewer,” they recall. By the time Mae had ran to find another lighter she had already found her own, setting her wishes into the night alone: “And I try to reach out to you but I / Can’t read the wishes in your heart”

It follows on from their breakout single ‘I Can’t Be Your Guy’, and supporting performances for Silver Gore and SKINSHIP. The track is a euphoric club cut with urgent synths, lending an underlying sense of horror as they disappear into the party: “I throw our cash in the air / You shake out your long hair / Feel like I’m falling in line / I can’t catch you and I’m here / We move faster, faster, faster…”

The visual world for ‘Burn Your Wishes’ leans into body horror and gore; the sensation of disassociation from one’s own body in the image-based world. The artwork is a platform heel wrapped in bloody bandages; a performance of femininity coming at the cost of Mae’s own identity.

Straight out the gates, Maehem99 has found champions in The Line of Best Fit, Wonderland, Rolling Stone UK, DIY and more. An artist in command of their own vision, from here onwards the only fantasy maehem99 embodies is their own.