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For nearly a decade, María Zardoya and drummer-producer Josh Conway built up The Marías together. Their romantic and creative chemistry defined the band’s unique, unmistakable sound: a psychedelic dream-pop, with whispering vocals and lush arrangements. Although Zardoya and Conway’s long-term relationship ended before recording The Marías’ second album, “Submarine,” their artistic partnership endured. “Melt,” however, marks Zardoya’s first step into fully independent creation, under the moniker Not for Radio.

The persona Not for Radio is telling for an artist on the heels of newfound superstardom. “Submarine’s” third single “No One Noticed” was a viral hit on social media, even reaching #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Marías have opened for Billie Eilish and featured on Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” and Selena Gomez & Benny Blanco’s “I Said I Love You First” — collaborations that place them squarely within the modern pop zeitgeist. In other words, they have successfully crossed into the mainstream, a feat that many indie cult favorites never manage to achieve. In that context, Not for Radio feels almost defiant — a rejection of mass appeal. The music turns inward; smaller, more intimate, and stripped back compared to the cinematic worlds The Marías conjured through layers of meticulous production.

“Melt,” made in collaboration with indie rock songwriter Sam Evian and “No One Noticed” co-producer Gianluca Buccellati, feels like a familiar echo of The Marías’ surreal soundscapes, but with a more haunting and moody center: music that seeps rather than shimmers. The opening track, “Puddles,” floats uneasily, its melodies weaving into unexpected tones and intervals, while “Magnet” drifts like vapor, meditative and melancholy.

Despite that weightlessness, the music feels grounded — The Marías’ characteristic ethereality is palpable, but transformed into something earthier and more self-possessed. Recorded at Flying Cloud Recordings in upstate New York in January 2025, the album draws deeply from its natural surroundings. Between takes, Zardoya and her collaborators took hikes through snowy woods, and that imagery permeates through the writing.

“Spider crawling through the meadow / I’ll invite him to your door,” she sings on “Moment.” In “Swan,” she offers: “I could love you like a swan would.” The cold becomes a motif — both a landscape and a metaphor. In another single from “Submarine,” “Lejos de Ti,” she sings “El frío, la noche / Siempre me acuerdo de ti,” — “The cold, the night / I always remember you.” Now, in “Moment,” she melts into the elements: “Man, I want to melt inside you / Form to water, then to ice.”

“Vueltas” is a standout on the album, extending momentary warmth amid the album’s wintry stillness. Zardoya’s compelling, intimate delivery shines through, carried by a Latin undercurrent of tender strings and syncopation that recall her Puerto Rican roots. Lyrically, it’s a bittersweet reflection on love that refuses to fade. “Y tú das vueltas en mi mente / Y yo rezando que me sueltes,” she sings, “And you keep spinning in my mind / And I’m praying that you’ll let me go.” That tension between attachment and release runs through the record. Across the album, Zardoya sings to an unnamed “you,” the lyrics distilled into minimalist, repeated fragments that feel like small prayers: “Don’t go” on “Slip;” “I hope it brings me back to you” on “Back to You.”

The simplicity amplifies the record’s emotional weight, tracing a portrait of vulnerability and solitude in the aftermath of heartbreak. Though it may present itself as a love letter to nature, “Melt” is, at its heart, a dialogue with absence, each song mapping the contours of loss and the yearning that lingers in its wake. Where The Marías once sang through a unified “I” that blurred the boundaries between self and collective — a voice that could belong to Zardoya, Conway, or both at once — “Melt” finds Zardoya writing from a distinctly lone perspective.

What “Melt” accomplishes is less a departure than a distillation of the dreamy intimacy that made her band’s music irresistible. The curated, arthouse sheen of The Marías’ work gives way to a starker, more austere sound. These songs don’t seduce so much as they reveal, inviting the listener to dwell in longing, to sit with discomfort, and to find beauty in stillness. In doing so herself, Zardoya delivers her most unguarded work yet.