In her 2022 song “Sioux Falls,” Jesca Hoop looks out an airplane window and sees a whirling vortex the size of a stadium. Is it a body of water? A crop circle? No—as the plane descends, the scene comes into focus: thousands of men, women, and children, spinning “like thread around a spool,” terror on their faces, trampling those who lose their footing. The uncanny vision is made even eerier when Hoop spots her late mother dragging her five children through the human tide. Despite the grimness of the scene, the tone of the song is peppy and disorientingly pretty, with a shivery Dorian twist in its churning melody. The chorus’ ascending harmonies rise like an ecstatic congregation, and a cryptic, whispered bridge checks off a packing list for the apocalypse: “A torch, a Zippo/A pocket knife, whistle/One space blanket and a first-aid kit.” The first time I encountered the song, I listened three times in a row; I’ll never think about Armageddon the same way again.
Hoop is a California-born singer-songwriter who left the Mormon church at 16, lived off the grid for a few years, nannied Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s children, and ultimately decamped for Manchester, England, nearly two decades ago; she has a knack for rendering big subjects in head-turning ways. She has an eye for a vivid detail, a fondness for trenchant metaphors—her 2019 album STONECHILD was titled after a rare medical phenomenon in which a woman unknowingly carries the petrified remains of a dead fetus in her body, sometimes for years—and a cheerful disregard for musical convention. On Long Wave Home, her first album in four years, she mostly keeps her gaze focused close at hand, writing meditations on love and human frailty, along with a few sharply rendered protest songs. But whether confronting a friend’s addiction or addressing a nation on the brink, she writes and sings from a singular perspective; long after they’ve finished, her songs linger in the mind, buzzing with restless energy.
Long Wave Home is Hoop’s first self-produced studio album, but rather than opt for folky simplicity, she has leaned into her idiosyncrasies, leveraging an ear for studio craft honed by mentors like John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding) and Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Feist). Muted guitars twirl in curlicued shapes, fleshed out by harp, woodwinds, and brass; clanking bells and mbira-like harmonics flare up in quiet patches, and background vocals fan across the stereo field.
Tripping along a lilting triplet rhythm, the album opens with one of its catchiest melodies—and one of those sleight-of-hand maneuvers that are Hoop’s specialty. “There is no wrong weather/Only the wrong clothes,” she begins, putting a fresh kink in an old saw, before pivoting to the song’s namesake: “Adam, Adam,” she repeats, harmonies spiraling upward. With dreamlike logic, the meteorological conceit turns into a mountain road, and then an overlook on an unexamined life: Whoever Adam is to her, and whatever he’s done, she’s all out of patience. He’s out here in spiritual flip-flops, and she’s taking her umbrella and going home. The silver lining is in the song’s sparkle; there may not be a sweeter song about giving up on someone you love. (A bit like Adrianne Lenker, whose music hers sometimes superficially resembles, Hoop is fond of peppering her songs with her characters’ given names; on one of the album’s most bittersweet songs, she wistfully urges a friend to “choose Viv over drink.” )
Sweetness is part of what makes Long Wave Home so consistently dazzling. Sometimes it’s a grace note, such as the wordless background coos of “Now the Ash,” a song about the inevitability of betrayal told in metaphysical imagery that John Donne would appreciate, with a keening melody reminiscent of Cate Le Bon. Dulcet tones are the focal point of “Love Is Salvation,” a gentle acoustic ode to love’s redemptive powers that uses architectural salvage as its central metaphor. Hoop isn’t afraid to be almost unfashionably earnest—“Love is salvation and art is for life,” she tells us—but she can also be wickedly funny. In the middle of this graceful, grateful reverie, surrounded by swelling horns, she pauses to consider past loves, the ones responsible for the wreckage out of which she and her partner have crafted their present home: “Did they write you/Did they call/If they left you high and dry/Then I say fuck ’em all.”
Her sense of humor drives “Designer Citizen,” a protest song whose defining feature—as though Hoop suspected that our era had become immune to protest songs—is its implausible and implacable perkiness. Set to jaunty horns and mallets, fluffed up with vibrant background vocals and spiked with jarring harmonic shifts, the song is a tribute to a utopic new America as envisioned by a nativist true believer: “What we need is the brawn of a strongman/Look he’s runnin’ ’round/Doin’ strongman things,” crows her self-satisfied narrator. Ironic yet stone-faced, it’s a Jonathan Swift boat for a nation of border walls and immodest proposals.
There’s nothing didactic about “Designer Citizen”; we don’t learn anything new about the MAGA perspective, or come away armed with critical tools to fight it. From a tactical and even a strategic perspective, I’m tempted to say there’s no real point to the song, but it’s bright and absurdist and joyful, a belly laugh from the prow of the Titanic. Not so “Playground,” easily applicable to Israel’s treatment of Gaza (or Russia’s of Ukraine, or America’s of, well, take your pick): In an inversion of the old teach-your-children-well adage, she asks darkly what will become of humankind in a world “where rubble is playground.” It’s an electrifying lament led by an incandescent guitar line and a mournful, Middle Eastern-tinged vocal melody. Whether or not a protest song can change minds in the 21st century, I suspect that the song’s unusual 14-beat pattern is intended to unsettle, to wrongfoot anyone feeling too complacent as the world burns.
Hoop has said that for years, she composed her songs without writing them down; she worked them out by singing while she walked, carving them into her memory as she went. Something of that oral (or even oracular) feeling persists in her music today: the chanting, the repetition, the strange time signatures and abrupt shifts, as though she were rushing through her thoughts in real time, uninterested in fitting her phrasing to a more conventional rhythm. The title track, which closes the album, sounds like something she might have made up while walking. It is a song in part about the act of songwriting, about putting words to inexpressible feelings, about selves carried in sound itself. “Let’s climb a radio tower,” she urges, and it sounds like she’s imagining telekinesis, or even communication with the dead. Every sound that has ever existed happens at once—“The bell rings/The pin drops/The whispering wood/Only transfer/Never die”—and she conjures an ocean of voices, one of them hers: “Invisible pulses are carrying me/To the other end of your line.” Something about the totality of the image, the everything-all-at-onceness of it, recalls the churning vortex of “Sioux Falls.” Only here, instead of apocalyptic terror and a nightmare vision of a twisted faith, it’s Hoop’s home-grown belief in redemption: music as the true path to deliverance.
