Three years ago, Mia Carucci posted “Badlands” to Soundcloud. Along with the trip-hoppy track—“the portishead is strong with this one,” one user commented—it included an image in which Mia wears a shirt emblazoned with the words “I trust God with all my life after all he gave it to me.” Since then, Mia hasn’t lost interest in the shades between dark and light narrated through the stone-by-stone-built castle, shallow breaths, hilltops, and tower-stuckness of “Bandlands.” Nor has the LA artist come undone from the pull toward underworldly images.
Mia’s latest, ‘Deities in Stone,’ revels in the murkiness of myth. To listen is a bit like descending into an ancient cave and being lured toward a candlelit grotto, with muculent limestone walls flickering and dripping at once. Marquee track “Sybele’s Plea” indeed is a song to Pluto’s Gate, or the Gateway of Hades, where only eunuchs of ancient goddess Cybele—known as Magna Mater (or great mother of the gods) to the Romans—could enter without feeling the effects of the cavity’s toxins. As such, ‘Dieties in Stone,’ written and produced by Mia, with additional production by Estoc on select tracks, becomes an entrancing, murky prayer, as if Mia has constructed their own gateway to an inferno for their disciples.
It’s really fun to think of it that way, anyway—enter this subterranean holy space and emerge anointed, if you dare. Maybe you’ll come out with “The God in You” (which might be my favorite of all these hypnotizing hymns—along with “Pulse” which glimmers with more liquid than the rest). I’m reminded of a literal cave I once visited in Greece, where everything was both slick and jagged and my voice echoed, and I couldn’t see the bottom. I got dizzy and held onto the railing for dear life because I thought I might fall down down down and a stalagmite would pierce my heart. But it was so beautiful and old and it felt like I had never not been in that cave.