Tiny Habits' Secret is Hidden in Their Harmonies

On a December summer day in Melbourne, I took a tram as the sun set to the Croxton Hotel in Thornbury. I was finally going to get to see Tiny Habits, the Boston trio that I had followed from echoey stairwell covers, to impressive back up vocals, to their own headline show.

Maya Rae, Cinya Khan, and Judah Mayowa, met at Berklee the first semester they were back on campus after the COVID pandemic. In March of 2021,  after singing together a few times, Maya recorded and posted their rendition of Carley Rae Jepsen’s “Call me Maybe” onto her Instagram account, which was met with great support. Many covers and a little less than a year later, Maya announced that they were officially a band, and their name was Tiny Habits.

The band succeeded in not being pigeonholed to their covers, but rather gained success with their independent music. Their EP tiny things, featured a cover of landslide, sandwiched in between the acoustic “hemenway” and the reflective “some things (i’ve learned),” enticing fans who only knew them from their covers to branch out into their originals.

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In May 2024, they released their first full length album, All For Something, entirely made up of original songs. Both the EP and the Album have given the band the opportunity to tour, opening for Gracie Abrams, Noah Khan, Vance Joy, and Lake Street Drive, as well as hosting a range of headline shows in North America, Europe, and Australia.

The discourse around the band and their success often stems from the foundation that they “got lucky on TikTok,” and were able to leverage the momentum to their advantage. But as I stood in the pit of their Melbourne show, surrounded by fans of all ages– all staring adoringly at the three figures on stage– I didn’t see three performers on a platform, I saw three friends, and I understood that Tiny Habits’ secret lay in harmony.

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For one, their impressive melodic arrangements were a key factor in the band’s social media success. The rich timbre of their voices blends seamlessly, creating warm, resonant sounds that weave into unexpected, captivating harmonies — leaving listeners wondering how they pulled it off. This approach works especially well in their covers, where they build on familiar songs, making their arrangements stand out even more powerfully. Still, when it comes to understanding how the band transcended their social media success, the secret is in the harmony of their personalities, and of their personal development as musicians, which intertwines just as effortlessly as their voices.

What people who claim that Tiny Habits was an overnight success fail to understand is that the exponential growth that took them from Berklee stairwells to Melbourne stages in less than 2 years was driven by three hardworking people who put their all into getting into music school in the first place. Not only this, but their pivot to working as a band was not a light switch either. When talking about how they write their music on Ones to Watch, they described that for the album, many songs had been written individually and then brought to the band later, highlighting why the quality of the music is so high despite the (seemingly) short time it took for them to put the album out.

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This is not to say that the band does not write together. The more life experiences they share, the more that they collaborate on songs, all visually reflected in the trust and friendship that permeates on stage, but by guaranteeing that they also have space for individual creation, they ensure that each member’s unique voice and style continues to shine through. This balance between collaboration and individual artistry is what keeps their sound authentic, and continues to draw people to their original music despite being initially known for their covers.

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All For Something is a versatile album, full of folk and acoustic tracks like “Circling,” “Mudroom,” and “Planting Flowers,” that let the trio’s harmonies and lyrics take center stage and carry most of the musical weight, but like they didn’t limit themselves to covers, the trio is not scared to explore sonically. Songs like “People Always Change,” and “I Don’t Have the Heart,” veer more into strong percussive rhythms and vocal modulations, more often seen in pop and soft rock. Nonetheless, the trio stays true to their honest lyrics and complex melodies as the backbone of every song, ultimately creating a record that, although diverse and exploratory, remains cohesive and complete.

As they embark to create songs together for the first time, I wonder how their growing friendship and trust will be reflected in their music, how the careful balance of being friends, independent artists and members of a band, will test and expand the music that they can create, and the boundaries they’re willing to break.

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