The Texan-born multi-instrumentalist mari rubio, who records as more eaze, had an awfully busy year in 2025. She teamed up with Lynn Avery to form the duo Pink Must, and they released their self-titled debut. She and claire rousay released the collaborative EP no floor and collaborated with Grumpy. She remixed Friendship. It looks like more eaze will keep that momentum going into next year, when she releases the new solo album sentence structure in the country.
mari rubio grew up playing traditional folk and country music, and sentence structure in the country will apparently integrate that influence into the blurry, glitchy music that she makes these days. She recorded the new LP with fellow improv-world musician Wendy Eisenberg on electric guitar, piano, and vocals, as well as guitarists Henry Earnest and Jade Guterman, cellist Alice Gerlach, and drummer Ryan Sawyer. Lead single “bad friend” is a quiet, intimate amble that does a nice job showing how these worlds can fit together. In a press release, rubio says:
Like a lot of the songs on this album, this has sat with me for years and taken many different shapes. I couldn’t really leave this one alone. It just kept coming back in my head. I hadn’t played it in years, and then when I played Chicago with Alan Sparhawke, I made a last-minute decision to come back to this song as a sort of comfort, and that opened me up to reconsidering the arrangement and form. The key for unlocking it was the pedal steel: it’s kind of about playing it in a non-traditional way, strumming it more like a normal guitar rather than using traditional pedal steel moves, but the main riff of the song is built largely about idiomatic idiosyncrasies/quirks with my pedal steel and electronics setup.
To some extent, this song lyrically is about knowing you shouldn’t have romantic feelings for a friend, but it’s also about not doing a very good job hanging out with people and generally feeling like an alien. Sort of about having trouble in Texas dealing with my social circles, especially the last few years I was there.
Below, check out “bad friend” and the sentence structure in the country tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 “leave (again)”
02 “distance”
03 “bad friend”
04 “crunch the numbers”
05 “biters”
06 “the producer”
07 “a chorale”
08 “healing attempt”
09 “sentence structure in the country”
10 “move”
sentence structure in the country is out 3/20 on Thrill Jockey.
Laura Brunisholz
