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With its long and unyielding seasons, Portland would seem a hard place to live for someone who’s spent most of their life dealing with seasonal affective disorder. Yet Maria DeHart, who documents the condition vividly on “Spider” from her new EP Find Ourselves Again as Myriads, says she’s lived through drearier winters. “A lot of people take it for granted that it stays green,” the local artist says. “Everything doesn’t just die.”
DeHart didn’t end up in Portland entirely by choice. Born and raised in Virginia, DeHart first moved to Eugene in 2018 with her partner, then to Corvallis and finally to Portland. “I never thought of myself as being like a big-city person,” DeHart says. “But living in Corvallis, I came up to Portland to see shows, and I realized it’s actually not like a big-city feel at all. It was easy to get booked, and the people were really nice and not scary.”
DeHart had been active in the greater D.C.-area music scene in high school and college and found the transition to Portland easy enough, joining the local emo band Bug Séance in 2019. DeHart had always recorded solo music under her own name as an “acoustic folk” kind of thing while playing noisier music in bands, but following an album of lonely COVID-era dispatches called Quarantunes, DeHart was looking for a fresh start.
“I first gravitated towards being a solo songwriter, and now I’ve realized I find it more fun to have a full-band kind of sound,” DeHart says. “I wanted [my solo work] to be seen as a rock band instead of a singer-songwriter thing because that is what the music sounds more like these days, so it was better to have it be a project and not just my own name.”
Find Ourselves Again, out April 11, is DeHart’s second Myriads EP following 2023’s Win Some, Lose Everyone, and it’s her first to be recorded in a studio, albeit one known for heavier music than that which DeHart has made her specialty: Portland’s Helvete Studios, named for a Scandinavian word for “hell” and run by DeHart’s friend Joe Anderson. The result is a richer sound than before, with peals of guitar somewhere between vintage dream pop and the crop of melancholic surf bands that dominated indie rock circa ‘09.
“His repertoire is more heavy music, so he was excited for something different,” DeHart says of Anderson, who recorded and mixed the record. “I also think this album has a lot of loud and distorted layers he was interested to be able to work with. It was really fun.”
Another key contributor to Find Ourselves Again was DeHart’s partner Sean Cooper, with whom she performs in Bug Séance and who had input on a few of the songs on the new release. “We’d been friends and bandmates and touring together for years before we entered dating territory,” DeHart says. “Being in a band with someone is already kind of like being in a relationship in some way—we’d already slept in the same bed before.”
It’s not hard to read Find Ourselves Again as a breakup album, especially hearing the country-kissed “Call It Quits,” which bids farewell to an ex with such empathy and consideration one can only dream all romantic entanglements could end in such civility.
“It was like a bittersweet breakup with somebody who lived in New York, so it wasn’t going to work,” DeHart elaborates, clarifying that this was not the same person whom she’d followed out to the West Coast. “I think the songs sort of speak for themselves.”
Yet despite the melancholy subject matter on Find Ourselves Again, the overall impression from listening isn’t one of rainy-season doldrums or romantic turmoil but of uplift. DeHart usually writes songs in the major key, and her soft deadpan suggests a certain centered calm, even if she’s singing about feeling paranoid after killing a spider.
Maybe the tone of Find Ourselves Again reflects the sense of “groundedness” DeHart found in Portland as she became more integrated into the local music community over the course of playing in so many bands and working with so many collaborators. “I think it’s a pretty open-end accessible music scene,” she says. “There are a lot of small bands, a lot of small venues. You could see a show almost every night if you wanted to.”
SEE IT: Myriads plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895, mississippistudios.com. 8 pm Tuesday, May 6. $15. 21+.