Sometimes, the songs just don’t come. A musician could be going through the most acute anxiety of their life—a breakup, or the loss of a parent—and writer’s block can still paralyze. Marika Hackman had been struggling to write since 2019’s album Any Human Friend, a barn-burning celebration of lust, melancholy and being in your 20s. As time seemed to freeze during the early months of the pandemic, so did Hackman’s songwriting instincts. Five years later, Big Sigh has been described by Hackman as the hardest record she has ever made. It’s a breath of relief that sits between a reboot of the finger-picked acoustic guitars and whispered vocals of her debut, We Slept at Last, and the stark, danceable indie pop of her last two albums. But both of those descriptors might be underselling how new this album feels coming from Hackman.
Big Sigh is a knotty, downbeat album that shows the English singer/songwriter stretching herself sonically while still maintaining focus on her pet subjects. We’ve got relationships in flux and warped love songs, all set through the lens of sticky, harsh language and recurring images of parents, the intersection of childhood and adulthood and Hackman’s propensity for sad horniness. Where Any Human Friend focused on groove-oriented pop rock, Big Sigh begins with the mostly instrumental “The Ground,” which repeats an uneasy piano motif before Hackman’s voice arrives, pitch-shifted and ghastly: “Gold is on the ground / I was happy for a while.” An ideal intro, “The Ground” announces this record as a despondent work.
That intro lays the groundwork for the steady, atmospheric mood of Hackman’s songwriting here, which showcases her strength as a bummed-out balladeer. The crushed, worried “Blood” opens with a propulsive acoustic guitar rhythm that seeks to underscore the song’s tension, but the booming piano notes of the song’s hook and Hackman’s light, airy harmonies drive it home. “Vitamins” finds a similar balance, where mechanical percussion scrape against the pianos and string parts. It’s Hackman’s most quotable song on Big Sigh, leading off with the line “Mum says I’m a waste of skin / A sack of shit and oxygen,” which is affectingly queasy when sung through a vocoder. At the song’s instrumental climax, kicked off by a misshapen guitar lead, “Vitamins” is both pastoral and otherworldly.
Marika Hackman’s writing always circles back to uncomfortable lyrics, the kind that veer towards being macabre, as she described them in a recent interview, while still capturing these piercing moments of emotion. On the title-track, Hackman sings, “I’ve got fat red blood and flies sucking on my leather,” a prickly, immediately unforgettable line. The grease and sweat of “Big Sigh” is eminently apparent but the slow crawl of the drumbeat and synths reveal the heartbreak in her splintered, abstracted storytelling. With “Hanging,” Hackman uses analogous visceral images—a heart as “a hard brown stone” or “an embryo”—in order to depict how it can feel to purge yourself of someone. It becomes clear on the final line, where she sings, “I’m so relieved it hurts.”
The echo of Any Human Friend occasionally rears its head here, recalling Hackman’s expertise of lofty, sexy pop songs that remain arresting because of their cutting lyricism. In Hackman’s world, hookups are full of jolts, jumps and protruding things. Body parts crack, snap and pop, as if they are a contraption falling apart. “So sublime / Turn to slime,” she sings before probing Yeah Yeah Yeahs-esque synths jolt “Slime” towards a big hook. But even when Hackman is writing a nervous, exciting song about sleeping with someone new, the jangling, overcast guitars feed into underlying feelings of doubt and uneasiness. “Slime” is a celebration—“I see you crawl into my bedroom / Do you want to? I want to” goes the chorus—but it’s not certain how much fun anyone is having.
“No Caffeine” captures a similar aura as “Slime,” but focuses on Hackman’s chronic anxiety with lyrics explaining how to deal with a panic attack in listicle form. “Take a day off work, call your mum / Have a glass of wine, stay away from fun,” she sings in an alluring deadpan, with a solid, driving groove anchored in a consistent bass part. But the excellence comes in the arrangement, as vaguely chiptune synths bump up against violins, slowly producing suspense until horns and guitars erupt in the back-half of the chorus. Easily capturing how hard it is to try and ground yourself when you’re spiraling, “No Caffeine” is a minor miracle. After years of not being able to write anything at all, Marika Hackman has written her best song yet.
Listen to Marika Hackman’s Daytrotter session from 2014 below.
Ethan Beck is a writer from Pittsburgh who lives in Brooklyn. His work can be found at Bandcamp Daily, Paste Magazine, Washington Square News and others.
