Album Review: Madi Diaz, ‘Fatal Optimist’

Madi Diaz has a talent for brief, yet devastating observations: “Looking at who you are and what I can live with/I can imagine myself as a picture of something different,” she whisper-chokes on “Hope Less,” the situationship-rationalizing opening track to her seventh album. The lyric’s power is heightened by the arrangement surrounding it — just Diaz and her acoustic guitar, in a room so silent its settling is nearly audible. The same goes for much of Fatal Optimist, which largely eschews the more robust instrumentation of 2024’s Weird Faith in favor of stripped-down recordings that thrust her lyrics to the forefront.

Diaz, a songwriter’s songwriter who has spent time in Harry Styles’ backing band, began working on Fatal Optimist after a post-breakup seclusion on an island, where she immersed herself in writing about the frustrations she’d experienced. That extended catharsis led to acceptance, a journey mirrored by the album’s progression. “Feel Something” seethes with exasperation over a relationship locked in an increasingly anhedonic cycle, Diaz wishing she was “someone who doesn’t know your middle name” as an electric guitar that’s blown out like a bruise shimmers around her. Diaz has a rounded, plainly emotional alto that adds pathos to the more downtrodden lyrics — like those on “Flirting,” a morning-after breakdown of a rupture in trust with a spare voice-and-piano arrangement that has the weight of knowingly receiving the silent treatment. “Heavy Metal,” meanwhile, is a stunner, Diaz unpacking the ways her resilience and her hardness meld together with growing intensity until the song’s end, when she repeats the word “heavy” enough times to make it fold in on itself.

On the closing title track, light begins to filter in even as Diaz keeps her emotions close. She tempers the thrill of meeting somebody with whom spending time “might be hot, and it might be fun” with her “fatal optimist” tendencies of seeing where things could end, and for the first time, a full band comes in to help propel Diaz along the path to openness. Even though she’s wary — “I hate being right,” she sing-songs, repeating it enough times for it to feel like a mantra — she’s letting her doubts fall, and letting the world become just a bit more filled-in. The arc of Fatal Optimist and Diaz’s perceptive, insistent songwriting make that movement, even with its hesitation, feel like a victory.