It doesn’t get any more Seattle than Jancy Buffington’s musical origin story. A longtime visual artist, she started out messing around in GarageBand in 2018 while working at a genetics lab. When her boss at the lab asked her to curate art at the venue he had just opened in Ballard called Substation, she told him she was writing music. So he lent her an audio interface and a guitar. All of a sudden, she was recording songs.

Buffington, who released her second album as the leader of the dark shoegaze music project MØAA this fall, recently moved back to the Seattle area after three years living in Venice, Italy. That album, Jaywalker, was called “wonderfully consistent and consistently wonderful,” by Sputnik Magazine.

“There’s a strange beauty in the level of chaos of America,” Buffington says. “It’s very frenetic and can be unpredictable and somewhat unsafe, but it can be exhilarating.”

Finding chaos exhilarating is a central characteristic of the “Jaywalker.” To Buffington, a jaywalker is someone who always finds their way back to chaos, and her album channels that gravitation by exploring her teenage years in Seattle.

“I wanted to explore the more special moments—the few but special moments. The more teenager-y moments. The ones that had some innocence in there, but also in a true context of a lot of dark stuff,” Buffington says.

Growing up with divorced parents, Buffington split her adolescence between the Eastside and the Central District before it was consumed and polished by gentrification. She remembers getting up to “night-time experiences that were very mischievous” in Cal Anderson Park while other people were playing sports or going out for a fanciful night on the town.

On “K.O.,” a song from Jaywalker that is brooding and frightening in its sonic uniformity, Buffington describes her experience of getting jumped—certainly an experience within the dark context of the tender moments, and one she didn’t even intend to write about.

“I wasn’t really thinking about that consciously at all,” Buffington says. “I love it when that happens. Even if it’s a dark thing it doesn’t bother me.” By going through these dark things, she developed a profound understanding and appreciation for the world around her—or rather, an ability to see the beauty within the chaos.

It was that instinct—to find beauty amid the chaos—that led to the unlikely start of her music career in the first place. Soon after she borrowed that guitar from her boss, having never put out a single song and never performed live, Buffington decided to leave her career in genetics to be a full-time musician. In June of 2019, that decision took her to Venice to record her debut album with her longtime guitarist and producer, Andrea Volpato, in his studio, Fox Studios.

That debut album, 2021’s Euphoric Recall was more of a vague expression of the darkness in Buffington’s life than the specifically honed Jaywalker. It had a heavier and more distorted sound. But her experience living in Venice during Covid lockdowns also paved the way for what was to come next.

“When I first moved there, there was so much tourism. Packed full like Disneyland, and that sucks. It’s very suffocating. But because there was Covid, and there were lockdowns, I actually walked a lot when there was no one there. It was incredible,” Buffington says. “That’s a whole different planet, which I love. That contrast.”

Walking among the beautiful, empty streets of the otherwise saturated tourist destination, Buffington was alone. She didn’t speak the language, and barely knew any people. The one thing she knew she could do in this phase was write music, and that’s where she wrote most of Jaywalker, a process that transported her back to her Seattle youth.

“I was happy with my ability to persevere through isolation. I made it through something that was extreme on many levels, but it was also good for creativity,” Buffington says, adding that even while Covid enveloped Venice, the culture remained relatively stable, which affected her writing as well. “Part of me thinks [the stability] allowed me to go to certain places emotionally that were more sentimental.”

Buffington presents that sentimentality throughout Jaywalker as beauty within the chaos. The lyrics of “Like Me” are unambiguous in describing abandonment, but Buffington’s application of synths is lighthearted and alacritous. 

The title track, “Jaywalker,” includes lines like “always under weather in that old dirty sweater that never fitted me.” Yet it’s a danceable dark wave tune that makes you feel alright wearing that old dirty sweater over and over again. It still feels like home, even if it never quite fit.