Featured photo by Madeline Kate Kann.
Chloe Moriondo understands why you’d think oyster is a breakup album.
“I don’t mind if people perceive it that way, because I do write a lot about this all-encompassing thing that happened to me,” the 22-year-old pop star says of her new album. “Like, a 10-year best friendship is not something you can get over very quickly or not write about in a big upcoming project. But I see oyster more as a reflective rebirth album.”
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Indeed, across 13 otherworldly, oceanically influenced tracks, Moriondo has crafted an album that defies all expectations. It may have been forged in the fires of what she calls her “hell throuple” breakup back in early 2023, but oyster is “about so much more than just a breakup or heartbreak or feeling sorry for myself,” she explains.
“I explored a lot with being more introspective and being more self-aware of my own issues, my own shortcomings, faults, mistakes, vices, that I’ve never been too transparent with myself or my audience about,” she continues. “It feels like a very special new beginning that did come from a place of heartbreak and can wallow in it at times, but isn’t all-encompassed by it.”
Just a day before oyster’s release, Moriondo sits in the lounge of her record label’s office, repping her album’s aquatic aesthetic in a frilly, baby blue top, pearl jewelry, glistening tooth gems, and an assortment of silver rings — one shaped like an anchor keeps catching the light.
The ocean serves as far more than just a theme slapped on top of an unrelated project. Rather, saltwater is the blood running through oyster’s veins. Lyrically, the album returns again and again to the ocean, evident even in song titles like “shoreline,” “7seas,” and “abyss.” Sonically, its dreamy synths and vocals sound like they might have been recorded in an underwater cave. Even the album’s narrative arc ebbs and flows like the ocean, beginning with the crashing waves of infatuation on tracks like “catch” and “raw,” the reflective middleground of songs like “weak” and “use,” and the melancholic longing left behind when the tide recedes, expressed on the album’s closing run of “sinking,” “pond,” and “siren calling.”
“Imagery of the sea that I had already been dreaming up before this heartbreak had been really helping me pour out these emotions that I wasn’t really sure how to write about,” Moriondo says of the album’s maritime leanings. “Creating this conceptual sea world full of frivolous crushes, and underwater dance parties, and fishing for hours and never catching anything, was very special to me while going through such an emotionally turbulent time in general. Being creative with the oceanic, aquatic imagery that my brain had been so drawn to helped me a lot through that process.”
Moriondo recently discovered a throughline of water running through all her music like a river — pardon the simile. She tracks the references back through her artistic career: Her first ever official release was a song called “Waves.” Her hit 2021 album Blood Bunny featured the single “Manta Rays.” Her biggest song to date, “I Want To Be With You,” opens with the lyric, “Swimming in my T-shirts no matter the weather,” and two lines later, she tells her lover, “I see you in the water.”
“Imagery of the sea that I had already been dreaming up before this heartbreak had been really helping me pour out these emotions that I wasn’t really sure how to write about.”
– Chloe Moriondo
Moriondo started releasing music as a teenager, but even before she was working water into her songs, she remembers taking every chance she could to go for a swim. “We had a pool in my backyard, and my grandma would always say that I was going to grow gills,” she recalls.
“I didn’t even realize that that was in my blood, but I definitely, in my isolation post-heartbreak, was feeling very drawn to the sea,” Moriondo reflects. “It just feels like a very vast, beautiful, and very lonely place, yet it has so much endless potential, which was, I think, the energy of this album and what I was feeling when I was writing it: lots of loneliness but lots of potential at the same time.”
The dark side of her aquatic aesthetic is on full display in the slime-filled music video for “hate it,” one of oyster’s singles, which features deceptively eerie lyrics on top of its bubbly pop production. In the song’s first verse, Moriondo croons about stealing a stranger’s face and wearing it to bed, conjuring mental images straight out of Silence of the Lambs. (Morindo, unsurprisingly, is a massive horror buff: Her all-time favorite is Midsommar, while Late Night with the Devil is a more recent favorite. We agree that despite the hype, last year’s Longlegs missed the mark, though it did still deliver a few gold nuggets of greatness: “Let me in now and it can be nice!” Moriondo belts out in her best Nicolas Cage impression. “Me and my friend did that to each other for like a month after that movie came out.”)
Moriondo pulls up the playlist she crafted while developing oyster, featuring artists from Owl City to Shygirl to Red Velvet. (“I don’t know; I was just f*cking with K-pop for a moment,” she says through a laugh.) Her inspiration curation also extended to Pinterest, where she created boards for each of the album’s many moods: deep sea bioluminescence, icy ponds, and tropical kitsch, to name a few. Making the boards for oyster was Moriondo’s first time using Pinterest, one step in her journey of self-rediscovery.
“I never was a Pinterest girlie. I didn’t really get it,” she admits. “This was part of my problem post-breakup. I didn’t really understand what I wanted creatively that well. I didn’t understand how to put my own ideas together in ways that I wanted. Because one of my exes of the hell throuple — it’s crazy to say ‘one of my exes’; it’s so dumb — she was a really big creative part of my music up until that point.”
“Losing that relationship meant I had to know myself again. I had to figure out who I was without this person,” she continues. “Being able to do that was really important and special, because the creative stuff is very important to me.”
Moriondo looks back on her “hell throuple” relationship as a teenage misstep — not a chapter of her life she necessarily regrets, but one she had to go through to learn more about herself.
“Making mistakes is what you’re supposed to do when you’re a teenager, and when you’re a young adult, and even when you’re in your 30s — like, that’s what people do,” she says. “No one really knows what they’re doing. So I try to give myself grace for the sometimes unfortunately embarrassing mistakes I’ve made in relationships and life in general.”
“Losing that relationship meant I had to know myself again. I had to figure out who I was without this person.”
– Chloe Moriondo
As far as the throuple of it all, Moriondo doesn’t see polyamory as part of her life moving forward. “I view love as a very big, all-encompassing thing that can come in many different forms, and I think it is very possible — and very likely, even — to hold love for [and] be in love with more than one person,” she explains. “However, I think for me, the dynamic of being with more than one person is way too much. Personally, I don’t think I have the correct emotional boundaries and personality, maybe even, to be in a polyamorous relationship, which I learned the hard way.”
For now, though, Moriondo is learning how to be happily single. “The girl is taking time for herself,” she says. “It’s excruciating as a Libra, believe me. I am back on Hinge, but I will delete it soon. I promise. I’m so bored!”
Dating as a celebrity is a unique challenge, Moriondo says. Sometimes, would-be partners on Hinge open by telling her how much they love her music — her very old music, to boot — which, needless to say, is a major turn-off.
“Most of the time, honestly, I’m treating Hinge like it’s a game,” Moriondo admits. “I’m definitely, right now, trying to force myself to focus mainly on myself. And luckily, this album has given me a lot of great things that I am excited about and care about so much in the most whole and real ways, which is a good comfort when I get bored, and lonely, and the feelings that you naturally feel when you’re single after not having been for a long time.”
More exciting for Moriondo is her impending tour, which will take her across North America this spring before she heads to Europe this fall. It’s been three years since she was on the road for 2022’s Suckerpunch tour — a time when Moriondo says she was “frankly just burning [herself] to the ground.”
“I was in this relationship that I was miserable in. My personal life was in shambles. I was so unhealthy, physically and mentally. A lot of my emotional and physical needs weren’t being met by myself or others,” she reflects. Heading into the tour for oyster, though, Moriondo couldn’t be further from that headspace: “Now that I’ve taken this moment to write and to feel and create things and make this album that I’ve been envisioning, the only thing I want to do is tour. I can’t express how much I feel like this tour is going to heal a part of me.”
“It truly feels like a drug. The adrenaline and endorphins of being on stage with these awesome crowds who are so kind and excitable and respectful and attentive, it makes any bad feeling go away, at least for a little bit, which I think is awesome,” Moriondo adds. “The fashion on this tour, too? It’s gonna be so good.”
She won’t spoil exactly what that elevated fashion will entail — apart from one key detail. “Chloe’s abandoning her sneakers. Chloe is abandoning the Buffalo Londons she’s worn on stage for every show,” she says, pointing to the gray platform sneakers she’s sporting even during this interview. “This time, we will be changing it up a little bit. We’re gonna get a little diva-licious.”
Does “diva-licious” mean she’ll be rocking some high heels? “Maybe the girl will be a little taller than normal,” she hints.
Though fans won’t see Moriondo on stage until later this month, they can already get lost in oyster’s aquatic wonderland, a place that she hopes takes them on a journey of discovery not unlike her own.
“I hope when people listen to it, they feel like they can dance, or they can cry, or they can laugh,” she says. “I hope that they feel seen in their bad habits and their flaws. I hope that they can see mine as well, and I hope that they can feel how honest I wanted to be with them on this one.” ♦
Oyster is now streaming on all platforms, and tickets for The Oyster Tour are on sale now.
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