Sprawled out on the floor of her Brooklyn bedroom, MJ Upstairs writes with a burning heart. She is a keeper of receipts, ticket stubs, rusted keys; material objects becoming lyrics at the bottom of her purse.  Her music captures both the small and the monumental with ardent intimacy — from freeway traffic to wildfires, shy crushes to feverish desire. Through lyrics that articulate the indescribable and production that pulses, she moves effortlessly between whispers, screams, quiet loops, and spellbinding guitar. Her sophomore album, Like A Stain, Pink is an intimate, anthemic, and poetic celebration of all the memories and feelings that linger; stacked with lush vocals, droning strings, and ruthless drums, these songs will stick with you as long as the moments they invoke.

At her live shows, MJ explores the freedom that exists outside of a recording studio.  Always allowing space to improvise and expand, her released songs take on entirely new lives. She speaks to every  crowd as if they are her old friends, a complete ease and comfort on stage as she strums, sings, screams, and dances through each setlist. Songs blur, motifs return altered, and the room is pulled through waves of intensity and stillness. Similar to her recorded work, the live experience is immersive, intuitive, and deeply felt.

Beyond her own projects, MJ Upstairs is a passionate collaborator. She has worked closely with both filmmakers and playwrights to create soundscapes that bring their stories to life. Her score work on films like Linda, Arcadia, and Of A Sexual Nature creates the story’s texture while never over-inserting itself. Her scores reveal tension and longing that exist beneath the image on screen. Tones that flicker at the edge of silence, loops that feel like half-remembered dreams, melodies that dissolve as quickly as they arrive. Her sound design for projects like Ghost of You and In the Wake of Ruins, extend this language further, bending everyday textures into something unstable and luminous. A hum becomes a presence, a silence becomes charged; the familiar made strange, the mundane made mythic. Her work holds the viewer inside a feeling rather than resolving it.

Across mediums, she remains devoted to capturing what slips through language—arranging fragments of memory and sensation into something visceral, her voice always at the heart; intimate, anthemic, poetic, all messed up.