When Aya Sinclair was a teenager growing up in Huddersfield—a town in the north of England between Manchester and Leeds—she felt herself come to life in the swell of Christian rock. Someone sang about the Lord and blissful frisson radiated through her. Sinclair believed that feeling was the Holy Spirit. She joined a Pentecostal church. She worshiped. Then she felt another stirring. At first, it manifested as a sneaking aversion to the path laid before her: a university education, marriage, children, a nice job, a quiet home in the suburbs. The shadow of convention squeezed the air out of her life. She realized she might be queer. Sinclair confided in her church’s leaders, and they told her to keep herself locked in the closet or leave. She left. She went to Manchester, got into clubs, started making dance music, started using drugs, transitioned, found euphoria bubbling far, far away from the Holy Spirit’s reach.
Sinclair’s debut album as aya, 2021’s im hole, paired derealized drone confessionals with gabber-lite wallops. It was, she’s said, a ketamine album, an attempt to render the effects of the drug on the body by retooling the framework of the dance song. Standout “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under” is, structurally, pop, with verses and a refrain that you might call a hook if aya hadn’t hollowed out its beat and tossed it in the gutter. “Come over, we could fuck the void out of each other,” she teased, her voice slithering through waves of distortion, like she was promising a unilaterally bad time.
Now based in South London, aya wrote and recorded her second album, hexed!, from the perspective of early sobriety. During the first months of her recovery from substance abuse, she dug back into the memories she carried from her most acute terrors: cocaine-fueled all-nighters, dissociative panic attacks. The album roves, swarms, and stews like a mind starving for intensity, galloping along to the next high on bleeding legs. Deep in its mesmerizing glut are some astonishing works of synthesis. Sound bristles, foams, bursts, and oozes, lashing its acid against aya’s newly ferocious vocals. She presided over im hole like the emcee in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio scene: with wry, knowing diction, a little smirk on her lips, secure in the knowledge that none of what was happening was real. On hexed!, it’s real. She knows it. She tries to keep up the cool facade and she keeps getting dragged into the furnace.
Most songs are object lessons in visceral crisis. With “the names of Faggot Chav boys,” aya plunges her desperate yelps into blizzards of discomfiting noise: tachycardia and mosquito whines, silverware drawers hurled across a shitty kitchen, wet rubber slapping against the pool deck. “I don’t wanna dream anymore,” aya repeats at the chorus, as if her whole life had submerged into sleep paralysis. Acid house vesicles pop and bleed into throaty djent chugs on “navel gazer”; an industrial loop clanks over an insectile drone on “droplets”; “off to the ESSO” hits the ear like a few thousand inflatable hammers crammed with panicked wasps; “heat death” cooks 8-bit bleeps with the smolder of buzzing sub-bass. “No more gravity, no more inertia/Heat death/Everything stop,” aya commands in a dead calm after the beat drops out, pixelating her vowels and punching up her consonants to pierce the silence that threatens to smother her.
“They had me out on a witch hunt when I found myself,” aya seethes on the album’s opener “I am the pipe I hit myself with,” and yes, it sure can feel that way to be transgender sometimes. You catch a glint of self-recognition and realize the scythe you’ve been gripping is nuzzling your own carotid. In a recent Quietus interview, aya noted that Silvia Federici’s 2004 book, Caliban and the Witch, was a big influence on hexed! as she was producing it. Federici positioned the witch hunts of the Middle Ages as key acts of transitional violence spurring Europe from feudalism into capitalist patriarchy. The church executed women who wielded power outside Christian traditions; “women existing outside of the preordained structures for womanhood in the mode of the times that they’re living in,” as aya put it. “Obviously there’s a real trans allegory going on there that fits the present moment.” It might not be allegory so much as history repeating. Before Federici, Arthur Evans and Leslie Feinberg wrote about the entanglement of gender transgression and magical ritual targeted by the church. Arguably, some of those historically hunted witches lived within the vicinity of what we now call “trans.”
No matter the epoch, fear and disgust cling to those who manipulate reality in ways that aren’t supposed to be possible. That’s the dangerous thing about transition: It really happens. Plug a hormone into hormone receptors and the body changes itself according to genetic code it already contains. Dress a new way, change the way you move, modulate your voice, and social fabric shifts: People perceive you differently. Sufficiently advanced deviance might be indistinguishable from magic to some but it literally happens all the time. It makes some people very angry to suggest that reality might be more moldable than they’ve been raised to believe. It might just force them to consider the unendurable stagnancy of their own lives. On hexed!, plasticity of sound, plasticity of flesh, and plasticity of experience braid together into a single biting whip: a weapon, yes, and a lifeline too.
