As an actor turned songwriter raised by movie stars, Maya Hawke can appreciate the importance of a proper mise-en-scène. Within its first 10 seconds, her fourth album, MAITREYA CORSO, thrusts us right into the middle of a story about a woman and her hot-mess boyfriend in a Michigan hotel lobby asking “the nice lady at the front desk if she would put a Band-Aid on the back of his head.” From that suggestive image, Hawke unfurls a novelistic, semi-autobiographical song cycle about self-discovery and renewal, told from the perspective of the alter ego christened by the album’s title. “They put my picture on the poster/Trapped me on the rollercoaster/Now they’ve closed the gates for good/It feels different than I thought it would,” she admits on “Lioness”, a countrified alt-pop serenade that finds Hawke staring down her uncertain post-Stranger Things future, but you need not have spent three seasons on a hit Netflix show to appreciate its don’t-look-back sentiments. Hawke’s richly detailed storytelling is matched by an expanding musical vision that transports her far from her humble twee-folk roots, with “Devil You Know” seamlessly shifting from austere avant-R&B to warm gospel hymn, and the multi-sectional “Maitreya and the Way Back” shifting between arena-ready love song and free-floating symphonic psychedelia as if slipping in and out of a dream. But the album’s emotional centrepiece, “Bring Home My Man”, is a pristine portrait of Hawke in her acoustic-troubadour element, as she transforms her personal reflections on rocky relationships into a universal commitment anthem primed to a go-to first-dance selection at hipster weddings forevermore.