Donna Missal

Donna Missal crafts emotionally charged songs centered on love and longing, and her vocals—alternately coolly alluring and rawly expressive—bring those compositions to life with striking impact. She pairs introspective lyrics with electronic productions that fuse pop hooks and theatrical tension, a signature first evident on early tracks such as “Keep Lying” and “The Keeper.” That approach reached full expression on her debut album, This Time, which arrived in 2018, and continued on the more stripped-down sophomore release Lighter in 2020 before the torch-song EP In the Mirror, In the Night surfaced two years afterward. Following the loss of her major-label contract, she resurfaced in 2023 as an independent artist with the dynamic full-length Revel.

Raised on the East Coast, Missal grew up with a father who worked as a musician and songwriter and operated a New York City recording studio during the 1980s; her grandmother had also written songs in the 1940s. Once her parents started a family, they relocated to suburban New Jersey, where her father assembled a home studio from remaining gear. From an early age she sang on family recording sessions, among them an annual Christmas collection shared with relatives and friends, and she further developed her performing instincts through children’s community theater.

During her teenage years she shifted from acting to fronting bands, then began writing material in tandem with other songwriters. In 2015 she laid down the slinky, seductive “Keep Lying,” initially intended only as a demo to interest other artists, yet her commanding performance drew widespread attention online and the song amassed over 1.5 million streams. Momentum built quickly with additional digital singles, among them 2016’s “Sick” and “The Keeper,” festival appearances at Bonnaroo and Bumbershoot, and support tours alongside Lewis Capaldi, CHVRCHES, and King Princess. Two further 2017 releases, “Holiday” and “Transformer,” preceded the September 2018 arrival of This Time on Universal’s Harvest imprint. Lighter, her 2020 acoustic-leaning follow-up, included the anthemic “Hurt by You” and the smoldering “Let You Let Me Down,” while the five-track In the Mirror, In the Night EP explored shadowy electro-acoustic textures with trip-hop leanings in 2022. After parting ways with Harvest, Missal spent a year of personal reflection before issuing her third album, the independently released Revel, whose range spanned the propulsive electro-pop of “Flicker” and “I Saw God” to the spare acoustic introspection of “Paranoia.”