Airports have long been fertile ground for ambient music. When Brian Eno conceived Music for Airports in the late 1970s, he imagined sound as architecture—endless, neutral, functional. The goal wasn’t to inspire or move, but to soothe—to calm anxious passengers and to soften the blankness of waiting. Malibu’s debut album Vanities, which arrives alongside a video for “Spicy City” set aboard a plane, begins in that same liminal space. But where Eno sought to neutralise solitude, Malibu leans into it, treating loneliness not as something to erase but as something to inhabit tenderly.
The French composer and vocalist has built a reputation for crafting ambient music that feels both intimate and cinematic. After contributions to PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, the Palaces of Pity EP (named in DAZED’s 20 Best Albums of 2022), a collaborative Essential Mixtape with Merely, and a film score for La Fille Qui Explose that premiered at Cannes, she’s become a fixture of the European experimental scene. Her United in Flames NTS show has featured guests like Oklou, Evian Christ, Torus, and ML Buch, extending the same mix of melancholy trance edits and luminous pop fragments that shape her live sets at festivals like Atonal and C2C. With Vanities, her debut LP on Year0001, she brings that world into sharper focus.
Her 13-track debut is unusually concise for an ambient record. Most pieces run only a few minutes, resisting the expectations the genre often carries. Vanities isn’t infinite, neutral, or utilitarian; its tracks feel deliberately finite, cut to expose their edges. Rather than dissolving into background atmosphere, they ask to be sat with in their brevity, each one carrying a distinct and unrepeatable mood.
The album’s conceptual spine draws from the tradition of Vanitas paintings—16th and 17th century still lifes filled with skulls, candles and rotting fruit, reminders of mortality and the futility of vanity. Malibu updates the idea for an era of self-surveillance and mediated desire, where vanity isn’t so much a sin as a condition of existence. On Vanities, the self is not something to overcome but to sit with—to romanticise, to mourn, to find fragile dignity in.
Vocals mark the clearest shift. Malibu dials back digital treatments and builds the arrangements around in- studio keyboard improvisations, giving her voice a more upfront placement and a cleaner signal path. It no longer feels buried or disguised but present, fragile, and irregular. Language dissolves into tone, but the closeness of delivery makes body behind it impossible to ignore. This pulls her work away from pure texture and towards intimacy, reminding you there is someone breathing inside these soundscapes.
That presence emerges immediately. “Nu” opens with distant city sounds—a siren, wind, faint thunder, before unfolding into an eerie, atmospheric expanse, like watching cities from above. Tracks such as “A World Beyond Lashes” or “So Sweet and Willing” push the voice toward the choral and angelic, dissolving into the arrangement as if ascending. More than in her earlier work, these pieces feel cinematic, at times recalling Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s Revenant score—dark and solemn, yet carried by something gentler, almost sacred.
What emerges is a kind of redemptive melancholy—music that leans into unease, but instead of anxiety it offers reconciliation. It mediates on impermanence with warmth, where gloom coexists with tenderness and even hope. One Youtube listener put it simply: “I’m afraid of death, but when I listen to your songs it makes me feel like it’s not as scary as I think it is, makes me accept my faith with more ease”. That line captures Malibu’s paradox—there’s melancholy here but it’s softened, turned into something graceful. It’s like being reminded that endings are part of beauty too.
There are traces of hauntology here too—the sense of nostalgia for impossible or unfinished lives, the echo of things that never fully happened. But unlike the bleakness that often colours hauntological work, Malibu’s version leaves spaces for hope. Alone, yes—but not abandoned. More like tucked into one’s own thoughts, where reflection becomes refuge.
This isn’t an album that fits everywhere. You can’t just throw it into shuffle and hope it lands. Vanities asks for a certain kind of time, and for me it revealed itself in the evenings—not late at night, but that hour when daylight slowly fades. If I had to pick a day, it would be Sunday, for reasons that hardly need explaining.
Ambient music has long lived under Eno’s dictum that it should be “as ignorable as it is interesting”. In my opinion, forty-five years later, that line feels outdated. Ambient is no longer just architecture, it’s intimacy, a flexible emotional space that shifts from background to foreground depending on the listener’s attention. As Lawrence English wrote in his Notes Toward a Future Ambient, “Ambient is never only music for escapism. It is a zone for participation…a freeing up, an opening out and a deepening, simultaneously.” That vision feels close to Malibu’s. Vanities proves it—a work that insists on presence, where solitude is not neutral or empty but charged —with memory, unease, and a strange sense of grace.
That solitude is Malibu’s chosen terrain—her plane is empty, suspended, solitary. Yet in its quiet way it offers not a soundtrack for waiting rooms, but for the moments when we are left to face ourselves.