A powerful emotional exorcism formed of sweeping synth drones, circling sequencer arpeggios, screeching guitar dissonance and outbreaks of heavenly vocals, In The Pantheon Of Decay is the fearless and intoxicating new album by New York City based American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alexia Avina. Due for release on November 10, 2023, on limited-edition 12” vinyl and digital platforms, and preceded by the single ‘NPD / Father’s Day’ – released as part of Lost Map’s PostMap Club subscriptions service in August – it’s Alexia’s “ambient rage” record, as she calls it. Seven mostly instrumental tracks expressing anger, trauma and a search for peace which words could never alone suffice to convey. It’s her most focused and formidable work to date.

Raised in Southeast Asia, previously based in Montreal and now living in NYC, Alexia’s music exists at the nexus of dream-pop, slowcore, ambient electronica and lo-fi folk, and is always restlessly evolving and finding new forms. Her debut solo album Betting On An Island was released in 2018 on Never Content, followed by her second album All That I Can’t See in 2019. In 2020, Alexia made her Lost Map Records debut with the album Unearth, which received support from Paste, GoldFlakePaint and Clash among others. It was quickly followed in 2021 by the album A Little Older, then in 2022 by the Crush EP, which saw Alexia collaborate with electronic producers Talk Bazaar and teasea to embrace synths and drum machines. Additional to her prolific solo output, Alexia also makes music as one half of ambient duo Best Fern, who released their debut album Earth Then Air in 2023. 

“It is perhaps my most vulnerable, personal, and revealing work to date,” says Alexia of her fifth solo album In The Pantheon Of Decay. “And yet only two of the songs have words. It was freeing to express myself and my meaning without relying on the avenue of my voice as the primary vehicle. In certain ways I feel like it’s the only way to express the deeply emotional, nonverbal trauma inherent to this record.”

Recorded in a friend’s bedroom studio right after moving to NYC two years ago in “a period of free flow and free fall”, as she calls it, the album addresses head on Alexia’s conscious decision to cut her dad out of her life, triggered by a specific incident “but predicated on my entire life’s experience of having an absent and narcissistic father,” she explains. “The songs chart the journey of the immediate aftermath of that decision, as well as capture the states and feelings that were present during the height of the PTSD I experienced initially. Mine and my brother’s history started to make sense in a new way for me, dots were connected, truths realised.”

Opener ‘Flight’ features pulsing beats by Talk Bazaar, who also mixed the album, while Panther Hollow helped to record the closing track ‘NPD / Father’s Day’ to which he also contributed guitar. The rest is all Alexia, working quickly and instinctively, as is her style, using instruments and equipment borrowed from friends, embracing the unfamiliar and the new. “It was definitely a process of being open to whatever I had access to,” she says. 

From the submerged rhythms and distorted digital howls of ‘Cutting Ties’ through the monolithic slab of noise that is ‘Sleeping On The Floor In A Room With No Heat’, the five wordless soundscapes at the centre of In The Pantheon Of Decay rise, fall and fade away like violent seas or storm clouds. Waves of feeling – fury and despair, fear and yearning – crash through and against one another seemingly without order. A record about ridding herself of her father also finds Alexia trying to come to terms with the gap he leaves in her life, and the immutable, infantilising power a parent will always have over their child irrespective of distance or time. The album finds a resolution of sorts with closer ‘NPD / Father’s Day’, as Alexia retreats to her comfort zone of voice and guitar to share a searingly literal account of leaving it all behind. The pain becomes beautiful.

“I jokingly refer to this record as my ‘ambient rage’ album,” says Alexia, “but I think it’s an accurate descriptor. It still contains that soft demeanour of my essence, but its expression is harder and harsher than previously. It is fuelled by a deep sadness, a deep rage, at the core.”