In the hands of Amaya López-Carromero—known to the world as Maud the Moth—the spindle of The Distaff whirs into life, threading a tapestry both delicate and brutal, luminous yet shadowed by the weight of ancestral pain. This most recent offering from the Spanish-born, Scotland-based artist emerges as a séance of the self, a descent into the abyss of identity, rootlessness, and feminine trauma, summoned forth from the artist’s psyche and laid bare for the inspection, digestion and, hopefully, understanding, of the listener.

The Distaff—a title borrowed from the humble tool that winds wool or flax, yet steeped in the symbolism of the “virtuous woman” across cultures—spins a sometimes surreal autobiography that teeters on the edge of both the ethereal and the visceral. Here, the artist unfurls a sonic menagerie where folk tales, reimagined and fractured, sit uneasily at the mercy of the jagged edges of her musical lineage . This is no gentle pastoral idyll; it is the work of someone who constantly seeks to find ‘the edge’, more so than anything she has conjured before—a dystopian dawn breaking over a landscape unbound by time or place.

The album’s nine compositions, birthed on the stark frame of acoustic piano and voice, are fleshed out by ritualistic drums, mournful cello and violin, the instruments (augmented on occasion by electric guitar and synthesizer) are wielded like tools of alchemy. The process of giving form to artistic feeling mirrors the organic chaos of its creation—obsessive, raw, and alive with the dynamics of free performance.

Yet it is in track six, Despeñaperros, that The Distaff finds its blackened heart. Named for the Spanish canyon—a place of dramatic cliffs and violent lore, translating grimly to “where dogs are thrown off”—this piece is a cornerstone of the album’s universe. It unfurls like a sonic implosion, a vortex of anguish and defiance that crushes the listener under its weight while offering fleeting glimpses of transcendence. Guitars drone, voices whisper and wail, and the air thickens with the oppressive beauty of a psyche teetering on the brink. This is not merely a song but a descent into the sacrificial chasm of the misunderstood and the different—a masterpiece of emotional and musical extremity that outshines its companions.

Elsewhere, the album weaves a complex interplay of light and shadow. Canto de enramada might evoke the rustle of rural Spain’s vineyards, while Siphonophores drifts like a haunting underwater reverie, but each piece is stitched with the threads of wartime tales, familial rifts, and the dislocation of migration. There is no single narrator here, only a supremely crafted tale that seeks to meld together and bring understanding to several lifetimes of experience. Inspired in part by the Greek poet Erinna’s lament for a friend lost to societal expectation, The Distaff wrestles with the trauma of patriarchal ideals, seeking catharsis in the act of creation itself.

To listen is to labour. The artist demands not passive consumption but active communion—an emotional and intellectual plunge into the darkest corners of the self. The reward, for those willing to brave the journey, is a rare equilibrium: a balance of beauty and brutality, where closure emerges from the chaos like a fragile moth from its cocoon. Devotees of the extreme, the experimental, and the deeply human will find in The Distaff a work that moves body, mind, and soul—a coruscating rush of sound striking steel, resounding with the grief and grit of survival.

The Distaff is out now.