Marika Hackman Is Getting Ballsy With New Music

On her defiant, swaggering single Boyfriend, London's Marika Hackman sings about sleeping with a girl who has a boyfriend, and how said boyfriend dismisses their dalliances as being inconsequential for their absence of a man. "These're things that're personal to me, stuff that I've had to deal with, or seen my friends dealing with," says Hackman, 25. "It's important to be talking about these issues, but it's nice to explore them on a platform like music, where you can be quite tongue-in-cheek, where you can have fun with it."

She wrote the song in "a frenzy" where "the lyrics just flew out nowhere". "Then," Hackman recounts, "I looked back on it, like: 'wow, that's pretty fucking bold.' It's definitely out on the table, and open. It's a real sticking-your-middle-finger-up-at-the-world song. I had to ask myself: 'Are you ready to put this out in the world?' I thought for a second, and then I was like: 'yep!'"

The response to Boyfriend has been "overwhelmingly positive", so, Hackman reckons, she's "probably overdue a bit of vitriol". As first single and album opener, it's the introduction to 'Marika Hackman 2.0'. The wry, playful, rockin' figure found on Hackman's second album, I'm Not Your Man, marks quite a change. From her early EPs through her debut LP, 2015's We Slept At Last, Hackman was a nu-folk prodigy: signed at 19, mentored by Johnny Flynn, tour pal of Laura Marling (she distinctly remembers supporting Marling at St Michael's Uniting Church in Melbourne in 2013, as a fly flew up her nose). "People would be talking about me as this eerie, dark girl who sounds like she's wandering through a forest, brooding," Hackman offers, "and, as a human being, I'm not that kind of person at all".

Feeling as if her early career had stalled out, in 2016 Hackman parted ways with her label and management, and set about forging a new, not-folkie sound, with help from London indie-rockers The Big Moon. "Once I pushed through those initial fears — feeling scared, feeling self-doubt, feeling lost-at-sea — it became more and more clear that I could do it on my own," Hackman says. "I wasn't making it for a label, or a manager, or for anybody else. That made me feel very strong... So, I just let the music flow. I felt bold enough, brave enough, to just let it go, to not try and obscure things, or make them more cryptic."

Which led to Boyfriend, and which led to a record filled with candid, caustic lyrics. It's an LP more representative of who she is now, but not entirely. "I've been able to be very frank and direct with my lyrics, [but] it doesn't mean that I'm opening up myself to be judged," she offers. "Marika Hackman, the person, is obviously there in my music, but I'm not necessarily bearing my soul to everyone. It's funny, it's a split personality thing. There's the personal me and the performative me, and there's a struggle there, a fight between the two of them."