Ever since 2010’s The Boggy Mire, her haunted, lo-fi, country/folk recordings and exploratory songwriting have been shaped by intuition and an uninhibited desire to create, regardless of trends.
Fast forward to Hard Hearted Woman, her debut release for Sacred Bones, that instinct has matured over time into something quietly formidable. She mixes lush mysterious moods, brutally in the present moments and insistent warmth. It’s alchemical, ebbing back and forth between friction and care.
Written during a winter of cold-water plunges, river swims, long rural drives and late-night conversations about politics and art, Hard Hearted Woman carries the atmosphere of its setting. Recorded in Cogan’s Nanaimo studio the album feels elemental. Metallic guitars shimmer like wet stone; violins and voices rise and recede like fog off the water. Thematically there’s grief here, but also wit, heat, and an almost stubborn sense of pleasure.
“Honey”, sets the tone with restraint. Built on warm
strings and loose, driving percussion, Cogan’s smoky voice addresses the
album’s titular figure with calm reassurance. Written in response to
anti-trans legislation, the song never tips into sloganeering. Instead,
it offers shelter expressed through tenderness. “The Smoke” follows with
a hypnotic pulse of laid-back Americana slowly being pulled apart.
Cracked guitars and ghostly textures stack into a languid and uneasy
feeling groove. On “Division”, Cogan’s voice echoes across a stark
landscape as the song builds up against the night sky and she peers into
the darker corners. She searches for empathy as swarms of strings soar
aloft only to melt at the climax, decaying into the ether. It’s quite an
opening salvo of tracks.
And so it continues, meshing fragility and metaphysics.
Through “Bury Me” and “River Rise”, right up to the closing, sparse
steel twang of “Too Late” and its hung ending that continues to chime
long after it’s stopped. Despite its title, Hard Hearted Woman
isn’t about emotional shutdown, instead it reframes hardness as
resilience, like a protective shell that allows vulnerability to
endure.In a time that can appear bent on applauding cynicism Cogan
chooses curiosity. Her songs look straight into the abyss and still
reach out for colour. That choice, made again and again across the
album, gives it a quiet power, one as a listener you have to be willing
to absorb to feel fully.
