While 2021’s im hole explored the murky world of substance-fuelled benders and alienation from oneself in claustrophobic detail, hexed! reckons with the aftermath. “What happens when we start to reintegrate back into the body? And what happens when the dissociation isn’t an option anymore, and the only thing you can do is reintegrate all of those horrible little worms that are squirming around in there?” she asks out loud. “I guess the record is just like: I have been hexed in some ways. Here is how I lift the curse.”
Revisiting such a traumatic period was hard work, aya says. At the point of our meeting, she’s been nine months and – she checks her watch – two weeks sober, a long process which started while she was working on hexed!. Today, she sips from a can of Trip in lieu of a pint and speaks extensively about herbal tea and wholesome hiking trips in Wales. “Diving back into those places and forcing myself to sit there to be able to describe the kind of minutiae of whatever was happening at the time or, you know, my emotional landscape […] is an insane thing to do to yourself. It’s like inducing your own therapeutic trance [just] for the purpose of being able to write a record,” she says, wide eyed.
“But we got through it, you know? And it has been genuinely therapeutic.” It’s not something she’d like to make a habit of, though: aside from performing the tracks live each week, she said she has no interest in sitting and listening back to the record — at least for a while.
Along with the big lifestyle changes, aya’s creative process has evolved over time to focus on finding her own voice after LOFT’s exercises in genre-study and existing production techniques. “I was like, OK: I’ve done a bunch of research and now I want to take what I’ve got and consolidate it into something that is my perspective on things rather than just imitating what other people are doing. I think you have to learn how to do things right to learn how to do them wrong,” she says. It’s not about “breaking the rule per se, but playing with it.” And where im hole was created in a fugue-like state, the new aya is determined to make music with intention. Yes, she’s still confronted with the late nights and vices that come with touring, but this time she’s doing it with a level head.
