Counting Grouper among her primary influences, Mia Joy debuted her hushed and mystical, textured solo material on the Gemini Moon EP in 2017. Though grounded in typical rock-band instrumentation fleshed out with organ and keys, its overlapping vocal lines, spacy, sustained timbres, and echo lent a sleepy, psychedelic feel to the songs, as did their free-flowing structures. Four years later, these elements reappear in more-developed, higher-fidelity form on her full-length debut, Spirit Tamer, which doubles as her Fire Talk debut. The album opens with a ghostly, almost rhythm-less intro ("Spirit Tamer"), as if to prepare listeners for another world. A track list soon emerges, however, that, while guided by breathy, filtered vocals and hazy guitar and keyboard atmospheres, is often anchored by midtempo drum rhythms: They are decidedly songs. The dreamy, meandering guitar lines of "Ye Old Man" underscore repeated lyrics about a neglectful father ("It doesn't get me down, get me down, get me down…"). Elsewhere, the still-intimate "Freak" establishes its tempo with strummed guitar as part of a woozy, delay-suffused arrangement whose vibraphone-like keyboard countermelody has several components that make it sounds submerged. The abandonment-themed "Saturn" favors ethereal vocals and spare beats swathed in bright, humming keys, while the shoegaze-y "Haha" employs lusher layers and multi-tracked vocals for its uncertain outcomes ("Changing against our will/I knew that one day we would/Change for good"). Evoking unsettling, half-awake dreams, Spirit Tamer is sometimes so gossamer it barely holds its form ("Sword [I Carry]," "Candle Prayer"), so it seems fitting when it closes on a mallet percussion-arpeggiated piano lullaby, her version of Arthur Russell's "Our Last Night Together."