Dina Maccabee makes not knowing feel like a form of freedom on new album 'LMNO'

There's this beautiful contradiction running through 'LMNO'. Dina Maccabee spends much of the album searching for clarity, only to discover that the more interesting life begins when certainty falls away.

Throughout her new release, the Berlin-based composer, violist and songwriter turns that realisation into eight wonderfully imaginative songs, moving between art-pop, experimental songwriting, baroque detail, bossa nova, guitar music and electronic abstraction without ever sounding as though she's assembling genres for effect.

Its origins lie in voice memos she recorded while walking through Berlin during the isolating years following her move from New York. Struggling with a new language, unfamiliar relationships and the broader disorientation of pandemic life, she initially wanted somebody else to explain what everything meant.

Highlight 'Spell It Out' captures that desire brilliantly. Its playful "Hit me with the LMNO!" hook gives the record on of its most immediately memorable moments, but the album gradually starts arguing against its own premise.

'I Can't See It's Dark' begins from fragile optimism, 'Punching at the Moon' pushes against accumulated frustration, and 'What If This Body' redirects the search for answers towards something more instinctive and physical. Even the psychedelic strangeness of 'A Cat Dream' feels significant; as confusion stops being something that must immediately be corrected and becomes somewhere worth exploring.

The lush strings and intricate harmonies remain unmistakably hers, but the guitar becomes an important symbol of change in this release. Coming from rigorous classical viola training, she deliberately chose an instrument she didn't feel she had mastered, then tested the songs at Berlin open mics where mistakes couldn't be edited away. And that willingness to surrender control seems to unlock the entire album.

Producer Ron Shalom helps give the songs colour and dimension without smoothing away their eccentricities, leaving 'LMNO' sophisticated but wonderfully alive.

For an artist with such formidable technical experience, Dina Maccabee's most exciting discovery here is that sometimes mastery means knowing when to stop demanding an answer. And on 'LMNO', uncertainty becomes possibility, and she sounds liberated by it.