Saya Gray: the throwaways do the work on QWERTY III
The third QWERTY EP arrives with less than a week's notice: seven tracks of fuzzed guitar, stop-start production and throwaway logic, out now on Dirty Hit.
BY JOLT Staff · NOV 4 2026 · 2 min readQWERTY III is a set of throwaways that behaves like a record. Seven tracks, out now on Dirty Hit, built from fuzzed-out guitars, plain singer-songwriter melody and production that keeps cutting itself off mid-thought. Gray calls these EPs experiments between projects. She undersells them.
She spent a decade as a bassist before releasing anything of her own: Daniel Caesar's touring band, musical director for Willow Smith, a spell with Liam Payne. 19 Masters came in 2022, the QWERTY EPs in 2023 and 2024, then Saya in 2025, which made the Polaris shortlist and drew two Juno nominations. Since then she has played Turnstile support slots, taken a turn on Charlotte Day Wilson's 'Lean' and put a track on the Wildwood soundtrack.
“Q EPS ARE EXPERIMENTS BETWEEN PROJECTS. THE THROWAWAYS. THE CATHARTIC MOMENTS THAT DON’T FIT BETWEEN ERAS OF CHANGE.”
The EP appeared with less than a week's warning, which is the method. 'Q EPS ARE EXPERIMENTS BETWEEN PROJECTS,' she wrote. 'THE THROWAWAYS. THE CATHARTIC MOMENTS THAT DON'T FIT BETWEEN ERAS OF CHANGE.' And: 'I'D RATHER MAKE HONEST SHIT THAN SOMETHING THAT FITS IN.'
The sound is glitch-grunge, near enough: guitars with the edges chewed, drum machine, a mix that lets the low end go thin before it comes back loud. Melodies that would survive a piano are left to fend for themselves. 'Guanyin 06/10/25' puts a date where a song title usually goes, and the EP works that way throughout, a timestamp on a feeling rather than a song about one. 'Feral Child ;-0' takes its name from her phrase about 'transitions of a feral woman'; the punctuation keeps it from hardening into a manifesto. '4ll My Love (Wasn't Enough)' states a verdict and stops, the plainest writing here. '2 2 Baboon..' ends the thing on a title that trails off into a dot.
This is for people who keep Saya around for its odd corners, and for anyone who wants a melody and a malfunction in the same breath. It will not convert a listener who came for one clean chorus.
It thins out where the joke lands before the music does. 'YOU??? HUH???' and 'SPOOO0OOOOF' are funny on the page, and funny on the page is a smaller thing than Gray can do with a melody. On a run this short and this deliberately interrupted, two cuts register as punctuation rather than songs.
Still: seven tracks, a week's notice, no filler dressed up as a statement. That is a 3.5, earned in the gap between bigger work, where she says these things get earned. Nothing more, nothing less, she wrote, and the dot at the end of the last title agrees.
