Ain't No Shortcuts to Success

After being named as a member of Fender's Class of 2024 and lauded as a 2025 Spotify Artist to Watch, Maya Delilah makes good on those promises with her Blue Note Records debut, The Long Way Around

- BY ADAM KOVAC

MAYA DELILAH WAS sitting at home when she got the email. For the sixth year in a row, Fender had named a group of artists meant to represent the future of guitar, and Delilah had just found out she was a part of the Fender Next Class of 2024. For a musician who had been slowly building an audience over the past half decade, but had been honing her craft since childhood, it was the realization of a lifelong dream.

“Oh my God, it meant so much,” she says. “It was a proper bucket-list thing. I mean, with my Squier, I've been playing Fender my whole life and looking up to Fender my whole life. My amp that I've always had is a Blues Junior, and, yeah, it was just crazy.”

Getting a push notification on your phone might seem like an underwhelming way to find out you're being honored by one of the biggest brand names in electric-guitar history, but low-key seems to be a recurring motif for the British singer and guitarist. Her brand of soul-pop is decidedly mellow, with soft beds of multi-instrumental backing tracks laying the framework for Delilah’s tuneful vocals and melodic guitar lines. Listen closer, however, and there's some real artistic depth to go with the cool vibes. On her debut LP, she combines bluesy solos with folk, soul and funk to make a mixture that's all her own.

“The reason for the title of the album, The Long Way Around, is because it took such a long time to be okay with having so many different sounds and making them into an album,” she says. “I think I've always been super inspired by so many different genres like funk and soul and jazz and folk, and I always used to get really frustrated when I'd be on a path of writing quite a lot of folk songs, and suddenly I'd be really inspired by a Santana track. I'd be like, 'Fuck, I want to make something like this now.' This album kind of came about with the different sounds coming together.”

As her first album,