Maddy Davis - “What If?”

Maddy Davis is a rising singer-songwriter born in New Jersey and now based in Los Angeles. There’s a raw, confessional honesty to her lyrical voice that’s reminiscent of acts like Soccer Mommy and Alex G, accompanied by explosive, searing guitars and jangly, homespun DIY energy. Recently, she dropped the excellent single “What If?” - the first taste of her newly announced EP Smile At The Good, out on July 18 via AWAL.

“What If?” starts as an intimate acoustic-driven ballad - positing a series of hypothetical questions touching on themes of trust, loss, and regret - before exploding into something more stratospheric and cathartic, with wall-shattering, reverb-soaked guitars and pummeling drums clashing into a huge final crescendo.

“What If?” was the first track written for Smile At The Good, which Davis co-wrote and co-produced along with Jim Somewhere and Milo Orchis during a trip to Vermont. The track’s wondrously simple music video was shot on her mom’s 1998 camcorder, bringing that grainy, nostalgic energy into full focus.

“It just felt like the most honest way to match the tone of the song - a nostalgic kind of warmth that’s a bit unpolished, a little chaotic, but still oddly familiar,” she shared. “I wanted it to play like a half-remembered dream: flashes of night vision, seemingly too many people packed into a tiny room, and that strange mix of intimacy and blur that comes with looking back.”

You can pre-save Maddy’s upcoming stuff HERE and give “What If?” a spin or two (or more) below: