It’s getting harder to hold on what’s human these days, but singer-songwriterMadds Buckley is fighting the good fight.

An RIAA Gold-certified artist with more than 2 million monthly listeners, Buckley pairs clear vocals and unexpected melodies—informed by her education at Berklee College of Music—with a deep-rooted instinct for storytelling. Her music lives at a uniqueintersection: honest, accessible, andhighly personal storytelling that often incorporates themes found in anime, video games, and narrative-driven media. Even at its most fantastical, her music never loses sight of what’s real.

The result is a discography built on lyrical vulnerability and emotional depth. Buckley’s songs candraw from fictional or imagined spaces, but they’re always delivered with her heart on her sleeve.With Buckley, there’s a refusal to be boxed in that recalls acts like Cavetown and Lydia the Bard.

Following her 2023 release,My Love Is Sick, her next chapter has begun with singles that continue to demonstrate her range. “Overboard” is a driving, tightly-wound track that steadily swells, its momentum mirroring the narrator’s emotional overwhelm, while “Concept Without Proof” leans into early-2000s angst, feeling intimate and confessional while managing to leave ego at the door.

With her 2026 releases, Buckley expands her sonic palette and narrative scope. She asks questionsothers might shy away from, interrogating the incongruities of cognitive dissonance in tracks like“Human to You,” out now. She rejects willful ignorance on the marching, darkly theatrical track,calling out those who “plug your ears and listen,” selectively hearing only what suits theirworldview. “Split your mind in two and feel reality in one/ A fire's burning somewhere, but there'snothing to be done,” she sings.

Then, with “Battery Forming,” she captures the tension between physical needs and modernburnout. “It came from personal sensory issues and having trouble relating and connecting withpeople,” she explains. “There’s the general feeling of, ‘I wish I didn’t have to eat or sleep.’ Just treatme like a robot and plug me in.”

Then, “Sitting Pretty” continues the story of a character introduced in her previous album, Dog, still in a season of despair after a devastating breakup. She sinks her teeth into the devastating by products of internalized homophobia in the unflinching narrative, and the song is simultaneously a neat encapsulation of the sonic growth exhibited in Buckely’s current chapter: from an acoustic foundation, she intentionally layers her vocals as the song goes on, incorporating electric guitar and and building the drums. “You will move to different cities/ And I’ll still be here sitting pretty,”she laments, watching someone dear to her get away and grow while resigning herself to expectations others have of her.

The tragedy of a life unfulfilled is balanced by offerings like “Tomes and Tombstones,” where determination and endurance lay the path to peace. “Trauma is like a ghost over your shoulder, something that maybe you’ll never be able to shake, but there’s a determination to this song that says ‘I will survive this,’” she shares. Down the line, “Hate That,” arrives September 4, marking whatBuckley calls the most pop song on the record.

It all builds to Simple Binary and a Complex Phrase, out October 16, bringing her many threads together into a cohesive statement. The album’s focus track, “Coded Ways,” is pointed and tragically relatable. Inspired after hearing about people legitimately using chat GPT when flirting on dating apps—a moment that made her “want to slam her head into a wall”—“Coded Ways” appropriately conjures the image of a vintage arcade, glittering and sleek in its production.

While her influences span genres and mediums, Buckley remains rooted in a tactile approach to music-making, often returning to “real instruments” and a deference to acoustic song structures as a baseline—butSimple Binary and a Complex Phrase sees her expanding her sonic and thematic scope more than ever before. Throughout the album, she boldly confronts the relationships people have with technology—and with each other—holding a mirror to the present moment. It’s an album for those feeling disillusioned with a world that seems willing to cede more and more humanity to technology, and a call to action for those eager to resist.

“I think if my music can inspire people to keep making art, that’s good enough for me,” she confirms. “If writing a song makes someone want to draw a picture or make an edit of something, or write a short story or even their own song, that’s a win in my book. And being able to play music in front of people, play music with people—it’s this really beautiful moment where everyone is connecting over this one piece of art.”

By questioning the artificial, Madds Buckley manages to get to the heart of what’s most real: loving, losing, and persevering through the pain.