Mary Jane Dunphe, Brittany Basement, Memory Palace & Bella Hayes

at Current Space 

Mary Jane Dunphe is a poet and musician who tells stories–not through direct narrative but through embodied presence and performance, through cinematic and fragmented memory, the wild transmission of feeling. Her versatile songwriting has garnered critical acclaim in past projects such as the visceral punk of Vexx and Gen Pop, the minimal dream pop of CCFX and CC Dust, and the lonesome country-rock of The County Liners–and now Dunphe’s debut solo album, Stage of Love, is the start of a captivating new chapter.

The process of making Stage of Love began in 2019 at FEAL Studios in Brooklyn. At first the pace was slow, as Dunphe set out to define the sound of her solo project, but her self-assurance grew with each new song. “I think I was feeling tired of relying on bandmates’ consistent engagement and was also feeling more confident in my ability to write on my own, and was curious to discover what kind of sounds I would make,” she explains. “I think the kind of music you make is partially intentional and partially something that’s innate and you can’t control it. If you believe this then you can relax into listening to yourself rather than forcing some hyper-specific sound.”

The songs tremble with the contradictions of human emotion–want and detachment, tension and relief, connection and escape, power and powerlessness–all reverberating together in Dunphe’s otherworldly version of pop. The album opening title track sets the mood with an effects-drenched bass line and thumping beat that build into a euphoric chorus. The track encapsulates many of the album’s themes, Dunphe explains: “It’s about longing and trying to understand the difference between desiring love and just desiring. It’s about the pleasure and the suffering of the lack, and breathing into it.”