Lande Hekt - 'Cut My Hair'
Lande Hekt explores gender and identity on exposed new single ‘Cut My Hair’; a graze of broken scabs leaking interiority, dammed by a plaster of bedroom-indie riffs and defiant choruses.
This simple but impactful single explores important tenets of the human condition behind familiarly comforting guitar expressions. “Do you think I look different? I cut my hair shorter, I think I dress more myself these days”, Hekt sings on the chorus backed by punchy and uplifting electric guitar chords. The reference to cutting her hair shorter and dressing differently alludes to a change in her life. These universal transitions mark a metamorphosis - an adopting of accepted truths to become comfortable in one's own skin.
Hekt speaks about the importance of the themes underscoring this release saying it’s “all about how my relationship with my gender has changed over the last few years as I’ve become more comfortable in myself and understood more about what makes me happy”. Hekt goes on to explain that childhood “affect[s] us so much into our adult lives and [is] intrinsic to our personalities and the way we cope (or don’t) with life and relationships”. Imbuing her creation with such honesty, emotion and personal history is what makes this release feel like the spilling of a bowl full to the brim. The marrying of the small-scale but powerful instrumentation with the lyrical significance makes it feel not only like a musical release but a release of burdensome gender confinement - an untethering, an unleashing.
Fellow songs from her second album ‘House Without a View’ (released digitally on Friday 23rd September) such as Backstreet Snow and Gay Space Cadets are equally as impactful, having been deposited with the same concepts and motifs, like different flower heads laden with pollen from the same bee. Having prefaced the album so strongly, Lande Hekt’s upcoming UK tour in November is bound to be the perfect setting for her brand of raw and zestful songwriting.
Words by Daniel Badger
