There’s having your expectations met, there’s having them exceeded … and there’s this.
When i first got to know Aya’s music, in 2021 with her debut album im hole (one of my best albums of that year), i was deeply impressed by the way her voice operated as something avant-vocal. Not just a voice, but a shape-shifting entity, moving in, out and around atmospheric compositions in a way that teased, hinted, suggested and occasionally let rip. On her latest album Hexed!, she puts her voice front and centre, literally in our face, as the mouthpiece for a devastating sequence of tracks that chart self-examination, traumatic history, oblique wistfulness and possibly just a hint of optimism. “Where to begin, where were we before?” is its opening line, yet Hexed! is no simple continuation from im hole, but rather an enormous expansion in terms of verbal and musical sophistication. It’s a hell of a lot to take in.
It starts with an opening gambit filled with slow, initially measured but deeply acidic, barely-contained anger at past attitudes and identities. As the title suggests, ‘I am the pipe I hit myself with’ is laden with self-aimed, self-inflicted violence, stubborn and humiliated, frustrated and pent-up, coloured by dark, bitter humour. The music is slow, the tempo progressing without any haste, which suits the introductory, explanatory nature of this strong opening. “They had me out on a witch hunt when I found myself” she says, possibly cathartic, possibly critical, yet in the slippery way her voice continually pitchshifts this is clearly a place of fluidity not stability. Likewise, “I’ve been finding my grip / Clutched at straws …”, more contradictions, and as her voice is surrounded by pulsing, convulsive percussion there’s the sense that Hexed!, among other things, is a kind of reckoning.
From here we’re thrown into a place of pure adrenaline. ‘off to the ESSO’, a fever dream-nightmare, breathless and unstoppable, shape-shifting taken to an extreme here as beats are seemingly made out of liquid turned into semi-solid forms. There’s not a melody in sight but instead something between sprechstimme, rap and a rant, pitch materialising only as acidic bursts and stings, while bass is seemingly only present in order to surge and pummel. Demonstrating surely the most stunning linguistic ingenuity of anything released in 2025, the track is a super-bold move, pushing the album already to the limits, tilting from euphoria to emotional collapse, intoxication to overstimulation, manic night before to deadened morning after.
Whereupon we’re suddenly halted, as all that torrential flow crashes into the devastating internal reflection that is ‘the names of Faggot Chav boys’. Agonising wounds inflicted from within and without, looking back to childhood, friends and enemies, persecution from elders and authority figures. Here, dreams are the opposite of an escape, a place where this is no escape, not only within the dream itself but in the way dreams spill out into the real world in our memories and obsessions, reopening old wounds, dredging up the past and making it ‘real’ again. Having been halted, the album then encroaches on total stasis in ‘Heat Death’. By now, the euphoria of ‘off to the ESSO’ feels both a long way away and exposed as being little more than a brief respite (if that’s what it was) into mere surface, away from all this reality at the core. In its place, dissociation and a kind of numbed panic as the lyrics describe the laws of physics coming undone, winding down. Supercharged verses thereby feel like the product of reheating, mere microwave energy, while the true reality is to be found in the choruses, in their flat neutrality and blank crackle, and the extended coda, vestiges of beats and a lingering noise presence, finally dissolving in compression artefacts.
Having turned away from ephemeral narrative, Aya returns to it in ‘Peach’, where there’s a similar, stark leap between worlds in the move from verse to chorus. Again, the verses are dripping with propellant, turbo-boosted, the beats literal thwacks, hinting, with the title, at bruises, and beyond that to potental violence in the relationship the song recalls. The choruses aren’t so much memories as wistful possibilities of what might have been, but wasn’t: “we could … we would”, fantasies of a maybe life. They’re all the more poignant as, for the first time, Aya really sings; in the first chorus, the music is inward, soft chords like a burning light; in the second, it’s muffled, as if the imagined intimacy were cocooned in cotton wool, or snuffed out, vanishing from (non-)existence.
The title track starts the second half of Hexed! with its first instrumental. Sustained tones, minimal activity, gentle impacts, pings against the surface; but it’s all the product of tension, things pulled tight, hard-edged, no beats but also no silence. Like a buzzsaw the music is ripped through its centre, pained, elegiaic, somehow still singing through excruciating discomfort, those pings now like water torture, drops of acid. For a time, words have broken down, yet the music says it all.
We’re then thrown back, shockingly directly, to autobiography in ‘droplets’, that benign title belying how drenched the track is: rain, gutters, blood, body fluids, drugs, poison. Later on, the vocals will literally be drowned. Listless adolescence yields to a terrible merging of sex and exploitation, and it’s striking at the extent to which Aya isn’t unnecessarily vulgar in these incredibly hard-hitting tracks. There’s no litany of f-bombs, but almost a matter-of-factness, semi-numbed, in her recounting of things, which makes it hit even harder. There’s obviously anger in there, all kinds of emotions, but channelled into sonic poetry, rather than just a simplistic tirade of rage and vitriol. Even the word “shit” is elided in the first chorus, “sh—” indicating the word but also playing on “shut up”, more coercion from outside. Whereas at its equivalent word in the second chorus, “slut” isn’t just allowed to be heard but is shouted while everything else is whispered. This mode of expression, where things are carefully considered for maximum effectiveness, is so powerful and immediate, reinforcing that, in every sense of the word, Hexed! is composed. Maturity and agony don’t often go hand in hand.
The notion of a relationship of sorts with an other, captured in ‘Peach’, returns in ‘navel gazer’. There’s not a large amount of humour on the album, but here it’s foregrounded in an exaggerated, disdainful takedown of shallow masculinity, the descriptions essentially reduced to a checklist. The grotesquerie is enhanced through a language of powerful glitched, punchy beats and buzzing bass. In the choruses everything is swamped by electronics, but here that sonic power seems to be coming from Aya herself, inside (radiating), rather than coming from outside (threatening). It’s answered by the album’s second instrumental, ‘The Petard is my Hoister’, where the intense, metallic impactscape from before is left behind, replaced by gently clashing notes that sustain for a time then briefly pause, like they’re being sung on a single exhale. It unfolds as a series of chords trying to gain focus, timbral hints of organ mingling with a more caustic, dangerous razor edge. A strong pulse, akin to a laser blast, dispels tension rather than ramping it up, and in the final 30 seconds birdsong and ambient sound unexpectedly materialises.
‘Time at the Bar’ abruptly wipes out that world beyond, overwhelming it with intense juddering, pitched and percussive, followed by superfast beats. Aya’s voice is low in the mix, screaming but paradoxically almost emotionless, semi-robotic, processed within an inch of its life. Again the words become a list, ostensibly a sequence of toasts, some cathartic, others ironic. The chorus becomes extreme: she sings again – “To received wisdom…” – but the relentless myriad beats slice through the beauty and implied warmth. It’s forgotten, her voice becomes overpressurised, the whole texture cracking under strain. Even here, in the tribute “To 2.3 versions of you and me” there’s a final connection back to the imagined moments of connection and intimacy in ‘Peach’, though by now whether the emotions are conflicted about what might have been is impossible to tell. Sudden radiance erupts for a few precious, magical seconds, as if we were about to have a second chorus, another (albeit imprisoned) moment of pure song – but it’s cancelled, the frenetic beats suggesting a new verse coming instead, before everything is abruptly, crudely, finally silenced.
It’s a tough ending. Amid so much darkness, dragging weight and unstoppable percussion acting like a cage, it’s tempting to feel Hexed! doesn’t point to anything as a light source, a way forward or upward. Yet that instance of the natural world at the end of ‘The Petard is my Hoister’, briefly continuing into the opening ‘Time at the Bar’, is one of the album’s most powerful moments. A shocking glimpse of something entirely other, heard from a place that’s otherwise claustrophobic, a world enclosed and defined by walls of beats and noise, by sharp-edged and juddering pitches, against which singing is almost ludicrously impossible – such an inhospitable environment for song! – with Aya’s own voice either extremely close or so low in the mix she’s practically swamped. That moment of birdsong and the open air, it’s a flash of something that doesn’t remain, but it’s a reminder of something that is, at least, neutral, and at best, a possibility beyond this choking series of recollections and reflections, where creatures sing in large open spaces, a voice in complete sympathy with its surroundings. The fact that Hexed! doesn’t end there is obviously very telling. Yet it comes late in the album, and stays in the memory; it connects back to the references to landscape heard earlier – in infinitely less salubrious contexts – and suggests the possibility, one day, perhaps, of the beginnings of something redemptive.
Released by Hyperdub, Hexed! is available on vinyl and download.
