Donna Missal

Donna Missal’s voice hits you like a buckshot. It’s gravelly and bracing, and she stretches it into visceral almost-howls to chilling effect. This much was obvious on “Keep Lying,” the demo that appeared (read: it was leaked) on the internet in 2015. And on her debut album This Time, which dropped on September 7, Missalkeeps the fire from that choice cut burning throughout. That isn’t surprising, but the wickedly delicious part is how well she’s been able to cut that fire with cool tenderness, and how both elements work together to present the depth of Missal’s range as a singer-songwriter.

I approach songwriting in a theatrical way, and I think about the way it’ll play live.

“I approach songwriting in atheatrical way, and I think about theway it’ll play live. A lot of this albumcame together with that in mind,”Missal shares over the phone. She’sjust wrapped an opener run forBishop Briggs, and she’s in Baltimorepreparing for the first night of heropener run with Joywave and SirSly. Though Missal’s been steepedin music almost her entire life — herdad began recording her singingwhen she was 4 — the live touringaspect is still somewhat new.

Missal was homeschooled inMarlton, New Jersey for most ofher childhood. (In high school,she attended a theater program at a vocational school.) She grew up with five siblings close in age; her 18-year-old brother is actually a member of her touring band, a fact that “touches me! It’s part of how I’ve always wanted to run this business.” She’s effusive in her obvious affection for the support and foundation her family’s offered her: “My parents have always been really supportive of our creativity and our strangeness. They insulated us with a lot of acceptance.”

Missal’s grandmother was a songwriter, and her son (Missal’s dad) was an industry multi-hyphenate who ran a studio and encouraged all of his children to pursue their creative dreams. For Missal, that originally meant writing songs for other people. Collaborators include Macklemore and Rudimental, but part of the original reason she leaked “Keep Lying” is so that she could hold onto the song before it was, as per the industry, snapped up by another interested artist.

Missal is thoughtful about the nuts and bolts of musicianship in the modern age: “The way that the industry churns out new artists is, if you don’t have a body of work behind you, you make an EP and on that EP, you have the single. That single gets pushed to radio, and you circulate your EP on Spotify, and then turn that EP into an album maybe a year later, after doing a couple big features. That’s how it seems to be, the process for a lot of artists coming up in the digital age of music. You wanna give the audience something digestible.”

But while she’d steadily been releasing music, covers and original tracks and singles, for years, Missal always had her sights set on a full-fledged album, declaring, “I wanted a body of work. So instead of going the route of releasing an EP, I thought it’d be cool to instead start leaking songs that I knew would be on the album. That way it made you feel like you were, every time a song came out, getting a step closer to the inevitable, which was the album.” Part of her vision of This Time, whose name arises out of Missal’s observation that “the concept of time was stringing all of [the songs] together and creating the narrative of the record,” included a visual/ video element. The album’s cover is the capstone of a meta-narrative threaded throughout her music videos, of a woman coming to terms of who she is; what she wants; and the forces, outside and interior, working against her. She arrives on the cover of This Time resplendent and powerful and whole, which to Missal meant “standing really firmly and solidly, in a power suit. Here I am!”

As for the self-admittedly “voyeuristic” images that make up the single artwork for “Girl,” “Driving,” and “Thrills,” Missal meant for them to come from a single photoshoot, with their genesis in her insistence on presenting “myself in a way that was realistic and natural and true to form. The reasons for those images was to say like, this is my real body. This is what I look like; this is who I am. I’m flawed, I’m imperfect, and I’m accepting of that.”

That mission statement neatly dovetails into the themes on the album, which pulls from her years of songwriting experience but really came together in the past year, during weeks-long studio stretches in San Francisco and Los Angeles with producers Nate Merceneau and Tim Anderson. Missal sums up the album’s themes loosely as “self-discovery and self-acceptance and self-love and self-understanding.” Though songs like “Keep Lying,” “Thrills,” and “Transformer” come off as torch songs, “Driving,” “Skyline,” and title track “This Time” are much gentler vignettes. All of her songs feel propelled toward a Big Finish; the difference is that some tracks deliver on that, while others shy away from such an obvious resolution.

Missal credits her songwriting style to growing up listening to the canonical greats — Fleetwood Mac and Aretha Franklin, among others — but also the wealth of ‘90s R&B from her childhood; artists like Destiny’s Child, Alicia Keys, 3LW, and TLC. You can hear shades of Rihanna-voice on “Skyline.” A less immediately obvious influence on This Time is the similarly introspective and incendiary Sharon Van Etten. Several songs on the album are joint efforts between the two, including the standouts “Jupiter” and “This Time.”

Though the album’s tracks all have evocative titles, Missal admits that they’re often completely unrelated to whatever moment or mood she’s writing about: “The song ‘Transformer,’ the first time I wrote those lyrics was using a pen that I borrowed from the studio that was a Transformer pen. Like, the robots. When I used it to write, the robot guy moved. So I named the song ‘Transformer Pen’ … ‘Jupiter’ is the name of the synth that was used to create that line that runs through the song. No ethereal ties; it’s not about constellations or planets. Not about space, no aliens. Just my bad habits.”

Missal admits to favoring “classical” pop structures, but her different levels of delivery give her range — emotional, vocal, and performative. Much of the feedback about Missal’s live shows online is that of shock: That the songs are so fucking good, and that she performs them with an intensity that can’t help but turn heads, even from notorious jading opening crowds.

And though Missal’s already dealing with some social media negativity, she emphasizes that her rising profile can’t be anything but a boon, a way to foster connectivity with both those fans who’ve been following her for years and people just discovering her music at shows. These direct channels, which can evolve into sources of stress, for the time being “[make] me breathe a little easier. It’s not all for nothing… like, ‘I just wanna let you know that your album really helped me out.’”

The next thing Missal has her eye on is a full-fledged headlining tour of her own, tentatively coming together for early next year. Her name at the top of the bill and “the stage design, things that I’ve always wanted to do but never had the opportunity.” This Time came together as a record, in both senses, of Missal’s creative emergence, so it’s understandable that her main goal now is seeing it through. The rest of us will wait with bated breath to hear what comes next.

PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN FURTH WORDS LILIAN MIN