Every artist has to discover their voice. Gia Margaret didn’t find herself until she lost hers. With a vocal injury that kept her from singing for years, she developed other musical languages, mastering the grammar of an intricate, homey form of ambient music pioneered by Ernest Hood and perfected by The Books. The two largely instrumental albums the Chicago pianist and composer made at that time—2020’s Mia Gargaret and 2023’s Romantic Piano—allowed her to lose herself in the emotional possibilities of pure sound. Now, her physical voice healed and her artistic voice honed, she comes full circle with Singing, her first vocal album since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer. Led by soft piano lines that fall like breath on glass, the music on Singing evidences the same jeweler’s sensitivity to detail that she developed in her silence.

“There was a time when I really didn’t know if I would sing again. So once I healed, there was a lot of internal pressure to come back strong,” Margaret says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. So it felt like beginning again, and reconnecting with these very old, old parts of myself.” This feeling of intermixed alienation and rediscovery is palpable across the album. In opener “Everyone Around Me Dancing,” she watches a party from the wings, aware of how her body keeps her from communal joy while also providing new modes of self-knowledge. Shut out from the scene, she is “closer to the ground, the planet.” In “Alive Inside,” she’s so far away from the source that she’s praying to whoever might hear (“a god, a friend that’s gone, a spirit”). As her voice rises, it seems to be trapped in a web of distortion; it’s as if in her pursuit, she’s pushing at the very boundaries of what can be said.

It’s graceful touches like this—or the crackling drum machine in “Moon Not Mine,” the sampled voices that haunt several tracks, the clouds of strings both real and synthesized in “Rotten Outro”—that give Singing its remarkable depth. Everything happening in Singing feels expertly tuned to the precise emotional pitch of the songs. “You hear a sound and it makes you feel something,” Margaret says. “That’s why we’re drawn to music. I have a very emotional attachment to every tool in my studio. Each instrument has something in it that makes me feel a certain way.”

The process of making Singing was one of learning how to trust each of those feelings. The album was partially recorded in London with Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, who helped Margaret unify the spree of ideas she had for “Good Friend,” an album highlight that includes Gregorian chant by ILĀ and turntable scratches, among many other things. David Bazan and Amy Millan also make appearances, as do Kurt Vile and Sean Carey, while Margaret’s longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman plays on and co-produces much of the record. Deb Talan, previously of The Weepies, lends her voice, piano, and guitar to the album’s closing—and definitive—statement, “E-Motion.” “A lot of me meeting some of these collaborators (now my friends) fell completely into my lap,” Margaret says. “Almost as if they could hear something in me that I’m certain was influenced by them in the first place.” But, as she says, all of her attempts to open her music to other artists “did lead me back to myself, because I realized I really do like producing. I felt like I was missing out by not exploring those things on my own.”

Romantic Piano demonstrated Margaret’s ability to fold seemingly conflicting emotions around one another in origami melodies—the album’s “Hinoki Wood” went viral on TikTok for the way it suggested looking back fondly at innocence from a place of experience. Singing is no less evocative, thanks to Margaret’s gifts as both a producer and a composer. As in a proper natural garden, every sound has been set carefully in place without sacrificing its individual vitality. Its songs are instantly recognizable and accessible as traditional pop, but they’ve also been shaped by the rules of ambient music, unrolling in a sanctified drift of intuition. “I don’t know until I get in there,” she says of how the songs come together. “I start tweaking and tweaking until there’s a feeling that I get. And I think I did that on every corner of this album.”

Gia Margaret is always singing. Every note of this album sings a warm requiem to her past selves; every layer sings her future self into being. Across the album, she applies the lessons of speechlessness—the quasirational ways we communicate without communicating, the way formless sound can cut to the heart of things like a scalpel—to her own artistic voice. “It’s a little woo-woo,” she says, “but I felt my throat chakra opening as the process of making the record went on. By the time I got to ‘E-Motion,’ the last song, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the end of whatever cycle this is. And I’m ready to move forward.”

Singing was recorded in London, Eau Claire, and Chicago in 2024 and 2025. It will be released on April 24th