Marika Hackman's New Album Is Full Of Unabashed, Candid Songs About Sex

“As an artist, maybe it’s born out of loneliness, but I suppose I’m quite self-obsessed,” says Marika Hackman. “I’m interested with how I respond to situations, how I deal with things. I’m constantly mining into my own brain.”

The 27-year-old English artist is prepping the release of her third album, Any Human Friend, when The Music speaks with her. And, taken together, her three LPs — from 2015’s We Slept At Last to 2017’s I’m Not Your Man to this one — are a deeply personal body of work that’s growing more direct and plainly spoken with each passing record.

“This time,” Hackman says, “the language is more direct, and obviously that makes it feel more exposing. It’s a bit scary, but it’s fun. It’ll be interesting to see what people glean from someone being so direct. A lot of people find it really hard to be direct, I know sometimes I do, I find it really hard to have a lot of conversations about things. But, somehow, when writing music, I can just push everything to the forefront.”

What Any Human Friend is mostly pushing forward is unabashed, candid songs filled with sex: All Night about, well, you can guess by the title, Hand Solo about the joys of masturbation. These tunes harken back to Boyfriend, the lead single from Hackman’s last album, in which a titular dude dismisses his girlfriend’s affair with a woman due to the lack of a male presence. “With Boyfriend, there was a really great response to that, it really connected with people,” Hackman says. “I thought, ‘That’s really cool, I wanna do a whole album like that.’”

Having the word ‘human’ in the album’s title speaks on its personal content: the songs about Hackman’s own specific “human experience”, and how they relate to other people. “We’re all animals, we’re all humans. We should be more accepting of each other, as who we are at the core. And not judging each other by the ideas that we project on each other.”

“I know what I want, and I know how to say what I want, and I know how to get it.

Hackman, of course, has felt other people projecting on her. That was especially poignant on her first album, We Slept At Last, through which she was understood to be a folky singer-songwriter type. “The press very much tried to put me into a box. This very safe box for a way to view a woman. I was this spooky, ethereal thing, but tinged with sweetness; this mystical woodland presence who’d stay in the forest writing songs on a lute,” she recalls. “I was, essentially, called a ‘folky princess’. It was a hard process to go through, given that I was quite young. That really stayed with me.”

On the grungy, raucous, queer-themed I’m Not Your Man, she was rebelling against that pigeonholing. But with Any Human Friend, she “didn’t really have anything to push against”, able to make the album whatever she wanted it — and it wanted — to be. “I feel I’m very much more in control, now, as a 27-year-old,” Hackman says. “I know what I want, and I know how to say what I want, and I know how to get it. It’s a nice feeling. I feel like an adult, I suppose.”

Being an adult has allowed Hackman to tap back into the desires she felt as a kid. Having started playing piano at four, she always was composing her own pieces, and, after learning drums, then bass, then guitar, she’d write songs, always imagining that she’d grow up to make “music that was quite loud, quite raucous.”

“I had this innate feeling, from when I was a kid, that I would be a performer, that I would write music,” Hackman recounts. “Even when I was playing drums in some terrible band, I was always picturing myself as, like, John Bonham smashing out a solo in front of 100,000 people. That’s where my brain went.”

Hackman has, she knows, never actually played in front of 100,000 people. But she’s found success enough to measure up to her youthful dreams. “Playing in front of 1,000 people, and having them cheer and dance and sing back your lyrics, that’s more than enough for me,” she beams. “We’re all in this one place, having this big communal experience, and it’s because of something I’ve created, that other people have taken as their own and are now reflecting back at me through singing the words. That’s fucking amazing.”