At dawn and at dusk, in the garden at night, in the rain among the stones, Miyaxx finds its way through a landscape of myth, memory, nature and sound. With an open-tuned guitar serving as their compass, Lea Thomas and John Thayer have created Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun, an album that feels less like a collection of songs than a journey through shifting emotional and sonic terrain.

The album, out now, brings together the work of two musicians who have spent more than a decade developing an artistic language both together and independently. Thomas is a guitarist, vocalist and songwriter whose 2024 album Cosmos Forever explored expansive textures, saturation and slowness. Thayer is a percussionist, audio engineer and producer with a fascination for fourth-world sounds and an uncanny ability to weave digital manipulation into organic performances.

Partners in life as well as music, Thomas and Thayer are the only musical contributors to Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun. The result is a distinctive form of nighttime fuzz folk that exists somewhere between acoustic songwriting, experimental electronics, ambient music and distorted guitar. It is neither one thing nor the other. Instead, Miyaxx creates a third space where the two approaches continually meet, overlap and transform one another.

The album’s title track offers a window into the ideas behind the record. Thomas explains that while making the album, she was reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, which led her to consider the ways people across cultures have turned to recurring symbols such as the sun, the crow, fire and song to understand their own lives within larger stories.

“I was reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Power Of Myth” while we were working on this album and it got me thinking about how, throughout history and across cultures, people have looked to common symbolism like the sun, the crow, fire and song, in hopes to see a part of their story in the greater myths being shared, to feel less alone in their life experiences of grief, love, joy, death.”

That search for connection runs throughout the album.

Miyaxx recently released the spellbinding track “Blue Cloud White Sky,” accompanied by a video, followed by the seductive “Go Easy.” The title track, “Hold Your Ego Out Like The Sun,” further establishes the album’s unusual balance of intimacy and scale.

The music continually shifts between moments that feel close enough to touch and passages that seem to expand outward into something enormous. Thomas’ voice can sit at the center of a relatively spare arrangement before becoming surrounded by layers of distortion, electronics and manipulated sound. On “The Shape You Make Returning,” for example, the duo creates an increasingly massive sonic environment, with Thomas’ wordless vocals moving through a wall of digital noise.

Elsewhere, the record becomes surprisingly playful. “Go Easy” is driven by a propulsive bassline, while modular clicks and clacks suggest summer insects and frogs. Steel-string harmonics, field recordings, distorted guitar, synthesized bass and sudden bursts of percussion continually enter and disappear from the mix.

The album’s opening moments initially suggest the intimate guitar-driven atmosphere of classic slowcore before the arrangement begins to fracture and expand. Throughout the record, Thayer’s production allows the listener to hear both the physical performance and the digital world built around it. Automation and processing never completely erase the human presence. Instead, they create tension between the organic and the artificial.

That tension is central to what makes Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun feel so immersive. The album isn’t purely electronic, but it isn’t simply an acoustic duo recording either. It is a document of two musicians discovering what happens when songwriting, performance and studio experimentation are treated as equal parts of the creative process.

Thomas’ voice remains the emotional anchor. At times intimate and lullaby-like, at others distant and submerged in echo, her vocals move through the arrangements rather than simply sitting on top of them. Thayer’s percussion and production provide another layer of movement, from delicate rhythmic details to sudden cymbal explosions and deep, rumbling electronic textures.

The result is music that can feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

There is a sense throughout Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun that the songs are looking beyond their immediate surroundings. The album considers the smallness of an individual life against the scale of the natural world, the universe and the stories humans have created to make sense of existence. A single chord decays, but its harmonics continue to travel. A song ends, but its meaning can remain with the listener.

That idea gives the record its circular quality. The sun rises and disappears. Seasons change. Stories are retold. Songs are passed from one person to another. What begins as an individual experience can eventually become part of something larger.

For Miyaxx, that process of transformation is the album itself.

For listeners willing to follow Thomas and Thayer into their particular sonic universe, the album offers an experience that rewards attention: intimate songwriting surrounded by expansive sound, ancient symbols filtered through contemporary technology, and two artists exploring what happens when the boundaries between performance, production, nature and imagination begin to disappear.