Maya Yenn drops debut single she says ‘is an ode to Millennial anxiety’
An employee at RPC side hustles as an alt-pop artist and music producer on TikTok.
When Maya Whatton is not managing the law firm’s various social media channels as a digital marketing specialist in the London office, she goes by Maya Yenn, and is known for her inventive beats on TikTok using samples from everyday sounds and household objects.
Maya dropped her debut single, tiptoe, a few months ago, which is a self-produced anthem “to a brand of anxiety unique to Millennials and Gen Z”.
The song was crafted from everyday soundbites she compiled last year for Halloween. Maya had recorded a TikTok vid (below) featuring “spooky” sounds such as a death knell, a creaking door, a dropped pumpkin and a ticking clock, around her parents’ house in Staffordshire where she has been living during lockdown.
@maya.yenn Making a spooky beat for Halloween 🎃 🎶 #FirstPost #Halloween #SpookyBeat #Spooky #MusicProduction
She then developed the sounds to a beat after it went “semi-viral” on TikTok, amassing over 500,000 views overall. Her debut single, tiptoe, was the result and has garnered over 17,000 streams on Spotify.
@maya.yenn A beat but make it spooky 👻🎃🎶 #Halloween #Beat #Music #MusicProduction #Pumpkin #SpookyBeat #fyp #ForYourPage
Fans were quick to praise Maya’s creative efforts, with some saying “a new star has been born” and “this song gave me goosebumps”. Legal Cheek loves how Maya has matched RPC’s distinct purple and blue colour palette in her promo, whether intentional or not!
“When I was writing tiptoe I imagined anxiety as a person, and what they might say to me if we were playing a game of hide and seek,” said Maya on her inspo behind the track. “It was actually really empowering to write from this perspective because I started to see the ways in which our negative self-talk is really manipulative or just simply untrue.”
The artist also spoke about her own struggle with anxiety and wanting to encapsulate generational anxiety in tiptoe:
“It’s definitely a bi-product of growing up in a culture of forced positivity and hustle culture. The idea that, ‘you can achieve your dreams, it’s all down to you!’ is really toxic because it discounts how difficult it actually is for the majority of people and people just burn out as a result of not being able to keep up with this impossible standard.”
You can also find Legal Cheek on TikTok, at @legalcheek. Watch our latest clips and don’t forget to give us a cheeky follow.
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