A multi-instrumentalist focused on strings and piano, Macie Stewart had already moved through classical, avant-garde jazz, and indie circles when she teamed with Sima Cunningham in the mid-2010s to launch Finom, originally known as Ohmme, an experimental indie pop duo celebrated for its arresting vocal harmonies. Prior to issuing her first solo album, the delicate chamber-folk set Mouth Full of Glass, in 2021, Stewart contributed performances, vocals, and arrangements to SZA, Whitney, and Chance the Rapper; an expanded international reissue of the album appeared the following year.
Born to pianist Sami Scot, whose career centered on music, Stewart began piano lessons around the same age she started speaking. Raised in Chicago, she mastered both piano and violin before co-founding Kids These Days and Marrow during high school. Marrow’s Liam Cunningham, later known as Liam Kazar, introduced her to his sister Sima, and after a period immersed in Chicago’s avant-garde jazz community the pair formed Ohmme in 2014.
Working with a limited palette that nonetheless produced a dense sonic result, the duo quickly attracted notice for its angular guitar lines and vocal interplay. Their debut EP, simply titled Ohmme, surfaced on Overcoat in 2017. Around the same time they supplied backing vocals for Chance the Rapper and crafted string arrangements for Twin Peaks’ “Tossin’ Tears.” The August 2018 full-length Parts, issued by Joyful Noise, broadened the group’s instrumental range with the addition of official third member percussionist Matt Carroll. Extensive touring in support of that record shaped material for the follow-up, Fantasize Your Ghost, produced by Chris Cohen and released in June 2020. Throughout this stretch Stewart drew on her jazz, classical, and Irish folk experience to supply arrangements for Whitney, SZA, Knox Fortune, and additional artists.
She had started composing solo pieces in 2019 and tracked them with engineer Dave Vettraino, completing the work herself while confined at home during the 2020 pandemic. Orindal Records brought out the resulting eight-song Mouth Full of Glass across North America in September 2021. After Ohmme adopted the name Finom in mid-2022, U.K. imprint Full Time Hobby released an expanded edition of the solo album outside North America that November, adding the tracks “Defeat” and “Maya, Please”; the latter track was also issued domestically as a single on Orindal.
