"Foam": The Sound of Self-Discovery by Myra Keyes

October 13, 2025

"Foam": The Sound of Self-Discovery by Myra Keyes

There's a daintiness and a rebelliousness to Foam, the latest single from Chicagoan Myra Keyes, released on October 10, 2025. It's a song that curves like its title—gentle on top but full of the seething undertow of a rising artist not wanting to get shallow. Myra's music, in turn inspired by the weeping melancholy of Elliott Smith and the sonic textures of Warpaint, possesses that rare mix of bare emotion and deliberate craft. This isn't some other indie song born during bedroom sessions—it's a confession, a moment of late-night contemplation on the subway boiled down into song, a mirror held up to the self at twenty and on.

Foam's tale begins not in a sparkling studio but in a bright new creative refuge nestled in Portland's west hills—a place where minutes melted away and songs appeared to write themselves. With Scott Weddle and Matt Brown, aided by Joe Mengis and Scott McPherson, Myra found a setting both laboratory and living room. What began as a small demo project soon gained its own steam. Early recordings pulsed with too much potential to be "rough cuts," instead distilling into a complete record organically. Myra calls it "one of those fluke baby songs that was released as a newborn standing on two feet"—one of those instances where art feels like it's driving and not vice versa.

Musically, Foam drifts glibly from style to style—alt-rock, indie pop, dreamy daydreaming. Its rhythm is borrowed from Djo's DECIDE, namely the entrancing pull of "On and On," and its lyrical honesty nods to Edie Brickell's warmth and Hole's hardness. Beneath the song's gloss lies a picture of an agitated mind caught between expansion and yearning. Myra captured these songs amidst the chaos of her second year in college—late nights of quiet understanding, fleeting moments during class breaks, and the perpetual hum of train rides downtown. The outcome is an exercise in thinking about transience, procrastination, and the strange comfort of blaming oneself. She sings, "You'll never be right if you don't ruminate on your wrongs for a little while."

As Foam pours out into the world, Myra Keyes waits poised on the edge of something greater—a moment of artistic conviction that is both hard-won and entirely fortuitous. With a show at Reggies in Chicago on November 6th, she's bringing that same intensity out onto the stage. Foam is not a single sound—it's the hum of an artist claiming herself in undertow, coming to a balance in the swirl of change. In a world addiction-drunken on noise, Myra Keyes has found her sound—and it's one to listen to, over and over, like waves returning to the shore.