Everyone has that one big, pivotal moment in their life. Marika Hackman’s arrived early, when she was 17 years old and nearly died due to a ruptured appendix. At the time, she brushed it off in a way only a teenager could. But then came the “huge f***ing massive panic attack” that set off a lifetime of chronic anxiety. Hackman gulps down a mouthful of Guinness and sets it down on the table: “You know, I really should go get some form of therapy for that.”
Therapy’s great and all but have you tried writing a song about it? The Hampshire musician, now 31, has spent over a decade unpicking her brush with death in emotionally frank, perma-shifting music. It’s there on songs as early as 2015’s “Monday Afternoon” on which she breathes in the “sickly sweet of my rotting skin” against folky instrumentals, and it stuck around even when Hackman swung, gloriously and capriciously, into grunge-pop on her equally acclaimed follow-up records I’m Not Your Man and Any Human Friend. Hackman writes about other subjects too, namely queer desire, of which she is an astute (and blushingly explicit) observer, but the appendix episode is something she tends to circle – even when she doesn’t mean to.
