A va Max greets me in the lobby of her Los Angeles apartment building with a nervous smile, like someone about to rip off a bandage. For much of the summer, she’s been MIA — vanishing from social media and seemingly abandoning the rollout of her new album, which drops at midnight. Fittingly, it’s titled Don’t Click Play , leaving fans to wonder if her disappearance was part of the plan all along.

It wasn’t.

Up until this conversation, Max has said nothing online about her album and what led to it . But, as she tells me in the elevator, “the silence has ended.”

After a Fourth of July performance she now calls “uncomfortable,” Max vanished from social media and public view. She was facing intense online hate, had just cut ties with her managers at MDDN, canceled her fall tour

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