It was an image of a hand that first drew me to aya—a clammy hand reaching out into the void, holding a wad of crumpled trash like a sacramental offering. The mysterious photo on the cover of im hole, the 2021 debut album from the London-based musician, beckoned me inside her fascinating, sometimes frightening world of sounds, like club music as envisioned by a sleep paralysis demon. Over industrial textures, gummy basslines, and brittle breakbeats, aya pitched her voice to sound like, well, an evil witch, alternately whispering and howling incantations: “Me more! Red shoes or blue shoes! Tick tock goes the broken clock!” I can admit that none of this was my idea of a good time. But there was something resonant about the notion it presented of the self as a sinkhole into which you can fall, and keep falling.
If it weren’t apparent then, aya makes it clear today that the album was, in part, about doing ketamine —often, and with a transcendental zeal. It would be a stretch to say im hole romanticized the experience exactly, though of course, there is romance to be found within a world that has become an endless after-hours flophouse. Four years later, her second album, hexed!, casts the previous record’s themes in a flickering, fluorescent, boldly unflattering new light. With sounds inspired by her childhood predilection for nu-metal and hardcore, then translated through synthetic instruments she designed and built herself, aya tells a different story—this one about the chaos-purgatory spiral of addiction. (This time around, the cover art features a gaping mouthful of live worms, the mouth her own.)
Over the phone a few days before hexed!’s release, I cannot help but to confess that on first listen, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. So viscerally does the record channel the experience of being off your head on booze and drugs that, two tracks in, my own mouth had gone dry and I’d become convinced my life was careening out of control. “Do you ever have those dreams when you’re sober, but you dream that you’re fucked up and you wake up gasping and screaming?” I ask with trepidation, explaining that my first spin of hexed! had gone something like that. Graciously, aya receives the review with a knowing laugh. “Absolutely,” she assures me. “All the time.”
On second listen, though, I began to have some fun. The dizzy sounds of songs like “I am the pipe I hit myself with,” it turned out, were less oppressive than they’d seemed, and in fact, insanely cool—strange, synthetic sounds applied to more traditional pop structures. Even cooler was aya’s voice, sometimes rapping in a hypnotic grime flow (as she does on lovingly-titled “the names of Faggot Chav boys,” where instead of sleep comes visions of “vulpine features strangled with a power cord”), other times shrieking her lyrics with throat-destroying gusto. (“I used to say some shit about a stopped clock,” she murmurs on “I am the pipe” before switching to a scream, “as the TIME! SLIPPED! RIGHT! OFF! MY! HANDS!!!”)
But what obsessed me were the lyrics, which describe tragi-comically bleak scenes of contemporary abjection using language that felt borderline Shakespearean, tied up in elaborate rhyme schemes and tight lexical knots. “So there I woz, hand up my schnoz,” she opens “navel gazer,” accompanied by hacking cough, before rapping a passage I still can’t believe exists:
“Warning signs from out the fog and I’m inclined to bolt
I drive a wedge, lean off the ledge
A sibylline revolt
Abseil away another day supine inside the bag
The sodden rag, the modern fag
Come watch me as I molt.”
This mystically exacting wordplay is spell-binding—fitting for a record that steeps its themes of desperation and addiction in a heady brew of alchemy and witchcraft. Topics of esotericism have been captivating aya since she turned the record in last August, about a week before deciding she would sober up for good. (Hence the record’s feeling of full immersion—not past the shit, but in it.) Still, she remains wary at the idea of hexed! being reduced to My Addiction Record. “Or I don’t want it to be, like, The Trauma Album—because they’re kind of all the trauma albums. I’ve got a fair bit of it,” she chuckles wryly. “So I don’t want it to be defined by that.” It is the way she plays with genre, sound design, and lyricism that strikes her as most revealing—story-telling in her own enchanted, inimitable way.
While they’re both diaristic, I think there’s a narrative lacuna between the two. im hole is, like, scrawling on a notepad whenever you can hold a pen. hexed! is a far more studious approach to self-exploration. In the im hole album art, you see the hand coming from the void, and it’s just got trash in it—like, this is all I can offer you, bottle caps and bus tickets and dirt. Whereas with this record it’s like, “Here is my open mouth, and I’m screaming, and I’ve got worms in there.”
As far as the actual narrative goes, I took a year and a half off before writing this record, just because I was touring so much. I was playing three shows a week, getting home, sleeping for 15 hours, waking up, having two days to myself, and then going back out again. Especially if you’re drinking a lot and doing a lot of drugs, you’re just never going to have the energy to write any music properly. So it wasn’t until the gigs started to run out that I had to slow my roll and actually dedicate myself to the process of writing another record. I was scared to get started with it: “difficult second album” and all that. How do you follow up something that’s an expression of all of the sides of your being? Well, you look at how things have changed.
Um… well, I did! I think since getting sober, it’s really hard. It’s a hard thing to do to your body, especially being neurodivergent and transgender, crossing borders all the time and having your presentation inspected constantly. It takes me a lot of time to adapt to new situations, new places. I was definitely using booze and drugs as a way of dulling that. And now the whole arriving at 5 p.m., soundcheck at 7, gig at 1, back on the plane again at 1 p.m.—I just never properly arrive. I’m learning to take more space for myself. I wish I could be a more chill person. But I’m just not.
I mean, I’m not coming to the U.S. until anything changes. With how expensive visas are, I don’t want to chance paying eight or 10 grand for a visa and then get turned away at the border because my passport doesn’t line up with what they see.
The process of getting sober, as is often the case, has been a long one. I stopped taking drugs about 15 months ago, but was still drinking. Then everything started to eke back in. My drinking got more intense, then I started doing drugs again. And it wasn’t until last September that I woke up one day and said, “I don’t want to be this hungover ever again, actually.” I wasn’t even throwing up and all of that. It just had slipped a little bit too far, after having it under control. So the writing of the record was done through that process—feeling like it’s getting out of hand. I mean, we finished the record in late August, so probably literally a week before I was like, “This is it. I’m getting sober now.” So it was in that push and pull: do I or don’t I have control over this?
But I’m absolutely a control freak when it comes to music-making. I’m a big fan of learning how to do things correctly so I can choose to do them wrong. With that comes an obsessive, studied control: understanding how certain genre forms work, or how certain mix techniques work, different synthesis styles. Then I can choose to meld those, or do the opposite of what I’ve learned.
A traditional pop song structure, where there’s an intro, a verse, a hook, a verse, a hook, a middle eight, a hook, and then it ends. “off to the ESSO,” “the names of Faggot Chav boys,” “droplets,” “heat death”— they’re all fairly traditional A-B-A-B-C-B song structures. As far as the “novel sounds” thing goes, do you know what physical modeling synthesis is?
In an abstracted form of synthesis—subtractive synthesis, FM synthesis, or whatever—it’s based on the idea that you have waves, or signals that are generated, and you manipulate those signals, either multiplying them or subtracting from them, right? With physical modeling synthesis, you model a physical instrument. So it can be, like, simulating a string, and the way that the string oscillates, and connecting that to a resonating body, so that you have something that emulates a guitar, or a piano. You end up with these instruments that you can play, and you modulate things like string tension, rather than just opening and closing a filter. It’s a far more physical relationship that you have with tone-shaping.
Anyways, my point is that a lot of the stuff on the record that feels like real sampled sounds are actually completely synthesized. So not only have I gone through this process of writing music for instruments, I’ve also created the instruments themselves. I am using synthesizers that other people have built, I’ve not made them myself. But I’m going from the ground up and building all of the presets, having an idea in my head for what this physical instrument would be, and how it would meld out of shape—not just writing the music for a whole band, but playing every instrument, and also designing all of the instruments, which are real and yet not real.
I would really love to play it with a band. I’d love to have a few purpose-built instruments that are just metal plates and springs, or maybe glass bowls. Then someone playing bass, someone playing a baritone sax, a live drummer, and then vocals. And synths, obviously, and a laptop. So like, a five-piece. That’s kind of where my head’s at.
I’ve played drums since I was probably five or six, and started being in metal and hardcore bands as soon as I got to high school. When I got to university, I was more interested in electronic music. And I used to go to music improv workshops with my dad when I was a kid. Both of my parents do devised theater, movement theater, that kind of stuff. So performance runs in the family.
Oh, no, absolutely I do. Massively. I tend to change my set every time I play it, because I find the anxiety really useful. It keeps me on my toes. If things get too safe, I get really bored. I like inviting the chaos of things going horribly wrong. Because then, when something does go wrong, you’re just forced to own it. You’re forced to be with that. And on one hand, that’s a truly live performance. And on the other, it’s a reminder that none of this shit matters. You trigger the wrong row of clips, run it back and do it again, and no one really gives a shit.
A lot of the lyrics started as situations of extreme distress, needing some way of exorcising it. I carry a notepad everywhere I go, and it’ll be six quick lines of semi-abstract journaling. Then those will get fleshed out into more formalized poems, and at the same time I’ll be writing instrumentals, and there’ll come a point where this music and these lyrics are describing the same thing. And then the process of bringing those two things together will formalize what the structure is.
I’m not a big reader, necessarily, though I enjoy reading when I do. But I’ve always enjoyed wordplay. I’m from a very punny family. Turning words over, finding double meanings, homophones—I was obsessed with grammar when I was a kid. Again, it’s learning to do things correctly so you can un-do things. But it’s an instinctive relationship rather than anything particularly studied, which is weird, because it sits in opposition to the way I do music.
Just because a particular style of language is archaic doesn’t mean that it’s not vulgar, right? I think we over-intellectualize words that have fallen out of usage. I also really like being precise with my language, particularly in writing—“supine” rather than “laid on my back.” When you’re writing lyrics and trying to fit as many words in as I do, you really gotta use ‘em.
But exactly! The point is, things are clearly going quite well. [Laughs]
It’s crazy how some people need to be told to live in the moment. Whereas a little bit less of the moment could really be quite good.
When I’m writing, I’ll unintentionally create these lexical sets for myself that I keep drawing from without actually understanding what I’m trying to express. But I’ve been reading a lot more about the history of esotericism for the last couple months since finishing the record, because I actually have time to read again. A lot of the trauma that I have comes from struggling with religion as a teenager. If you look at Protestantism, its growth throughout the Renaissance is absolutely tied to the birth of capitalism in a Western, European sense, and therefore, to the subjugation of women and minorities. So witchcraft as an antithesis, or a rejection of that, is something that I feel entranced by. It’s something that I’m only just getting to terms with what it means for me. But I’m just going to keep studying and see where it takes me.
I grew up in the countryside between a couple of major cities in the north of England, and all of those are divided by the Pennines, an open, sprawling range of essentially mountains which they call the “backbone of England.” There’s lots of peaks and valleys, and the wind moves so quickly and the weather is so abrasive that no vegetation can grow much higher than knee-height. Add to that the fact that most of it was deforested in the late 19th century for grouse shooting for landed gentry, and it basically means you have this open, barren landscape with these incredibly oppressive weather conditions. When you’re up on the top, you can’t see any villages or towns or anything nearby—it just feels like the end of the earth. It has this other-realm feeling; not post-apocalyptic, just a different space entirely. And I grew up 10 minutes walk from that. I’d go and walk the dog and in 10 minutes, you can’t see anything, just this empty bracken forever.
“Time at the bar” is about returning to that place. The song itself is written as a series of toasts, imagining returning home after being the prodigal youth. Starting a family, all of the mundane middle English shit that goes on, all of the weird baggage you pick up—proposing toasts to those as an examination of what that dull mundanity would be. Because growing up, not realizing I was trans until I was 25, I held onto this idea that that’s what I would do: I’d go away to uni, have my fun, play a bunch of shows, and eventually I’d come back to settle down and live in the village. My family aren’t like that at all, but I was like that. And it’s only really in the last two years that I’ve gone, “Hey, wait, that’s never going to be who I am.” So the ending of the record is getting up onto the top of the moors and screaming at the sky—and off and into the clouds, and then we’re gone.
Maybe you don’t have this expression in the U.S.—“time at the bar” means last orders. So it’s all of these toasts, and then ixnay, time to go home. And my going home is up onto the moor and off into the sky.
I kind of don’t have one. I live with my partner of six years, we’ve been married coming on two years now. This is it, you know? I’m not trying to get to another place. I’m here. This is good. And it’s a very recovery thing to say, but—each day as it comes.
