Where has Marika Hackman been my whole life? A quick run-down: After a handful of EPs, the English musician released her first full-length in 2015, We Slept At Last, a collection of elegiac ballads, released on the 1975’s label Dirty Hit. In 2017, she followed it with the more playful I’m Not Your Man on Seattle’s iconic Sub Pop, the gloom imbued with an acerbic attitude: “I’ve got your boyfriend on my mind/ I think he knows you stayed with me last night/ I held his world in my hands/ I threw it out to see where it would land,” she intoned on the opener “Boyfriend.” This flirty, more upbeat ambiance reached its peak on 2019’s Any Human Friend, a sultry pop masterpiece. After a covers LP in 2020 — on which she paid homage to Grimes, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, and more — Hackman is kicking off 2024 with Big Sigh, whose title kind of says it all.

Out on Friday on Chrysalis Records, Big Sigh is a big leap from Any Human Friend, but if you are lucky enough to have been tapped in since the beginning (unlike me), you know it’s more of a return to her drearier, more emotional roots. “Keep the light off/ We can fumble in the dark/ For the perfect epitaph,” she whispers on the drifting ballad “Blood.”

“It’s a reflection on nostalgia and pain whilst having an awareness of progression,” Hackman tells me about the album over Zoom, conveying the way her music feels like a balancing act — dread and suffering in one hand, hope and gratitude in the other, both equally intense and often in interaction with each other.

From the start, Hackman showed off her strength for razor-sharp lyricism, devastating and graphic: “So, I drown in your mind/ I will, I know I will/ And suffocate in your smoke/ Die, stuffing my lungs with their fill,” she lulled on “Drown,” the opener of We Slept At Last. However, the instrumentation is just as alluring. On her earlier material, sparse strumming on an acoustic guitar is sonically light and emotionally heavy; on Any Human Friend, gyrating synthesizers make her misanthropic proclamations glimmer: “‘Cause lately I’ve been trying to find/ The point in human contact/ I get bored like that,” Hackman drawls on “i’m not where you are,” a song that’s impossible not to dance to.

Whereas Any Human Friend was a space for Hackman to revel in desire, Big Sigh feels like a portrayal of the darker sides of love. There are flashes of passion on the enveloping “Slime,” or even briefly on “No Caffeine” as she goes through an eccentric to-do list: “Remember how to breathe/ Maybe try and fuck.” Otherwise, the songs have a masochistic texture; she rationalizes her pain by considering it punishment on the piano ballad “Hanging“: “Well I must’ve done something to deserve to feel this sad.” On the the chilling closer “The Yellow Mile,” which is out today with a video co-directed by Hackman and Nàtalia Pàges, she sings, “Bite my head off, spit me out/ You pick me up just to take me down/ Looking up at the ceiling cracks/ I’m a woman on my back.”

However, as much as a sigh is an expression of distress and weariness, it also signifies relief; the anguish being relayed is in the rear view mirror, and the harrowing memories have been sculpted into a beautiful album. Watch “The Yellow Mile” and read our interview below.

I read that you wanted to be a musician since you were a kid. I’m curious if you know why you gravitated toward that.

MARIKA HACKMAN: I grew up in quite a musical household. My parents just both love music. I think that translated across. Me and my brother both were being taught instruments from quite an early age. It kind of felt like something tangible and not ridiculous since I was a kid. The more I started playing different instruments and started to write my own music in my kind of early teens, that’s when I felt potentially it could actually become a career.

What did you write about in your early teens?

MARIKA HACKMAN: Great question. It was all really abstract. I mean, if you think about it, my first EPs I wrote when I was in my late teens, so it wasn’t long after I’d started writing. And they’re all quite abstract. I would take an odd social situation or crushes and things but I’d abstract it enough that you couldn’t really recognize what it was. There’s always been a kind of slight pull towards the macabre, which was definitely much more prevalent when I was in my late teens, early twenties.

I feel like late teens is a lot different from early teens. There’s a lot more to write about.

HACKMAN: Yeah, everything gets a bit more intense feelings-wise. It’s kind of stepping into more universal territory than childhood themes. Because what can you really write about there? Whereas I feel like everyone’s late teens, it’s kind of a torturous time and quite scary as well. There’s a lot to process, a lot of change and shifts, which I think is great in terms of inspiration for writing, but can be quite hard.

Was it always autobiographical?

HACKMAN: Yeah. I’ve never really done the thing of coming up with a concept or a character and then writing from that perspective. It’s something I might try one day, but it doesn’t really excite me or interest me at this point to do that. I feel like it’s more fun to just find out shit about yourself that you didn’t even know was sitting there.

It’s more of a risk to do autobiographical, especially with Any Human Friend. I imagine you had a lot of people being like, “Oh, you’re so brave for writing so honestly.” How do you react to that?

HACKMAN: It’s funny because it’s the stuff that everyone thinks is the bravest that’s actually easier. If a song is really, truly authentic and honest, it’s easier to write, and it’s easier to sing because I’m connecting with it anyway. It’s harder to lie, it’s hard to put on a character. So yeah, I did get a lot of that, but it didn’t feel that way for me at all. It just felt like what it was supposed to be, which was really fun and sassy.

After listening to Any Human Friend, I think you’ve really perfected the art of a horny song, which is really hard to do. I wanted to ask what you think are some perfect horny songs.

HACKMAN: Oh my god. That’s quite hard. Perfect horny songs. Oh, my mind’s gone blank. I’m looking over at my record collection… I mean, any of Prince’s songs are all horny classics. Actually, I was listening to a lot of Prince when I was writing Any Human Friend. So that kind of makes sense, channeling that energy. He’s kind of the king of that, I’d say. But I’m struggling to think of any particular songs from anyone. My brain’s gone to mush.

I think a common answer would be anything by Lana Del Rey.

HACKMAN: Oh, yeah. It’s like a sad horniness, which is quite teenage and quite gay. But yeah, I haven’t listened to a heap of Lana Del Rey. I’m rubbish at listening to music in general to be honest. It’s probably why I’m struggling.

“Sad horny” is how I would describe your new album.

HACKMAN: There’s a lot less horn on this record than the past ones. Obviously, “Slime” is the one that’s got that going on. It’s quite a good bridge between Any Human Friend and Big Sigh. But it’s definitely sad. It’s a kind of romantic, visceral sad, I think, and slightly fraught. It’s very introspective. I suppose that’s the mood of it — very reflective. Looking into the past and processing things.

It seems like most of your music meditates on relationships.

HACKMAN: Yeah. I don’t want to keep doing that, but it’s something I always come back to. I think I’m a really romantic person. I feel things very deeply. I think there’s just so much there when not only figuring yourself out in a situation, but there’s also someone else to be figuring out and who’s figuring you out. It’s such a good mirror, being in a relationship or dating people to look at yourself with and learn new things about yourself. I’m just fascinated by it in many, many ways. So it comes back a lot. And you can bury a lot of pain and stress from situations and some of the songs I’m writing on Big Sigh romantically, the breakdowns of relationships, they’re about relationships from years ago, or kind of pulling from here and there. It’s just working out what those residual feelings are and really going into them because it’s always fraught and it’s always shit and it’s always really fucking sad. There’s always gonna be something lingering.

You started that by saying you’re trying to not do that anymore.

HACKMAN: As much as I can. It’s something that I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to write like another relationship song,” but that it’s gonna happen probably.

On “Vitamins,” there’s an intense line about your mother [“Mum says I’m a waste of skin/ A sack of shit and oxygen/ Empty seed in a can of earth/ I’m a fucked up cradle for the afterbirth/ But dad thinks I could be something”]. Writing about relationships is tricky because it involves other people, and once autobiographical writing involves other people there’s the ethical question of how only one side of the story is being told. Then there’s also the possibility of complicating the relationship further by writing about it. How do you go about that?

HACKMAN: Something that’s really important to me is I don’t name-check people, unless it’s a positive thing. I don’t ever want to make someone feel like shit. I don’t ever want anyone to feel like I’m putting something out that’s just me kind of being like, “Oh, you’re the asshole and woe is me.” My privacy is for me to dictate, but someone else’s isn’t, so I’m never gonna drop someone in it. That’s really, really important to me.

Obviously, I do name-check my mom and my dad, and specifically my mom quite a lot. But the thing with that is we chat on the phone all the time and I can say, “Don’t worry, it’s just artistic license, it’s not actually about you.” I think just because the archetypes of mother and father are such strong symbols, I use that as a way to kind of reflect certain aspects of myself. My mom has never said any of that shit to me. But it’s more about the feminine, maternal aspects of myself, the fears I have around that and how that would be reflected from from that standpoint, not my actual mother. It’s very important to me that people don’t come away from any of my music feeling like I’ve slandered them in some way.

I wanted to ask about the first line on the album. It’s repeated a lot; it feels very poetic: “Gold is on the ground/ I was happy for a while.”

HACKMAN: It was just one of those ones that kind of popped into my head. It felt really evocative. I think it kind of sums up a feeling that’s across the whole record — a kind of nostalgia, a kind of yearning for something that’s been lost. I see this idea as water reflecting sunshine, looking down across some kind of valley — this beautiful thing that you have.

Then obviously the line “I was happy for a while” is pretty loaded. There’s a lot in there. There’s a lot of stuff on the record about the intersection of — really what we were saying in the beginning — childhood and adulthood. There’s a part of me that really mourns the loss of the simplicity of childhood. The way you have these cascading, bird-like string parts on these sweeping arrangements that feel like big outdoor spaces, but then you get these really intense industrial-sounding synths just breaking things down. That junction is quite a lot to deal with, and it was kind of capturing that. That line captures it perfectly… in my mind.

Why do you think you’re mourning childhood now?

HACKMAN: I think I’ve been mourning childhood since before I left childhood, to be honest. I think I was always hyper-aware as a kid that it was a special time that you have no control over it going. It’s just life. I was kind of a child for as long as I could be in a really sweet, simple sense. I was never in any rush to grow up at all. Then when I was 17, my appendix burst and that was really stressful. I nearly died, and I was like, “Oh shit. That’s intense.” I basically had my first sort of panic attack that was then the beginning of chronic daily anxiety up until my now 31 years of age.

So there was a real moment and I think that that’s what kind of makes it even harder. I didn’t feel like I grew out of it. And that was also followed by a couple of years of other pretty heavy things happening. I just feel like that gave me this perception of adulthood as this hulking beast on the horizon, as opposed to the joy of a new kind of freedom and all the fun that that brings.

And it’s not to say that my whole adult life has been riddled with me just whining about wanting to be a kid. I love so much about my life. But there’s this funny little part of me that just misses life before anxiety, really. Because that’s the main thing.

That’s wild that you remember your first panic attack.

HACKMAN: Yeah, it’s because I was on a plane. I had been in Finland, and that’s where I had been when my appendix burst. I’d been in hospital for like eight days. Then when we flew back, I was still in quite a lot of pain. It’s just really clear. I just remember being on the plane, and I had this feeling I’d never ever had before, and I thought I was gonna die. My mom just told me to go to sleep. And then when I woke up, I was back in England with anxiety.

How do you think anxiety has played into your music? Musicians have told me that music can be a way of grounding themselves.

HACKMAN: I definitely think it’s really helpful. It’s something I’ve also written about, even in pretty abstract ways, but since my first album and EPs when I was 19 and 20. Obviously, it was a fairly new experience, then. But I think it’s funny, certainly sitting down and playing my guitar and singing really connects you with your body. You’re also concentrating on something external and it can really take you out of that headspace.

But then at the same time, I’ve been getting this weird thing when I’ve been writing and getting feeling really inspired and I’ve just written half a new song, but when I’m finished I feel really weird and like I’m not fully in my body. Then I started to feel really anxious. So that’s not great, but the payoff is worth it. Because then you have a song. It can kind of push me into different spaces, depending on what’s happening, what I’m channeling. If I’m just sitting down and practicing my guitar, then that’s a really relaxing thing to do.

I imagine it can also be a source of anxiety sometimes. I read that you’re a perfectionist, which I am, too, with writing. If I’m working on something and it’s not going the way I want, I get really frustrated and anxious. And I’m like, “What if this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing?” Then just… existential spiral.

HACKMAN: Yeah. Very familiar with the existential spiral. That does happen a lot. The thing is that doing what I do has helped me understand how much I’m still capable of, alongside that, which is really useful. So even though sometimes it can feel like things are difficult, and I can have that reaction, I can still get an album made if that’s happening, because then you do still have the control to make changes and make it how you want.

I’ve played so many gigs in the middle of panic attacks. It’s just like, “Okay, well, if that happens again, I know I can do it. It’s not going to completely incapacitate me,” which is all really useful. It’s just not particularly pleasant.

How do you usually feel about an album once it’s finished?

HACKMAN: Really good, to be fair. If I didn’t, then there would be some serious problems. Because of the nature of me being a perfectionist, it’s very important to me that I like the music that I’m making. I don’t want to ever put anything out there I don’t want to listen to. So, with that in mind, by the time it gets to the end of a record and it’s being mastered or whatever, I’ve always been just really excited for other people to hear it.

I’m curious of how you got from Any Human Friend to Big Sigh. I dove into Any Human Friend first and I was like, “This is so much fun. I’m having a great time.” Then, you know, Big Sigh…

HACKMAN: I like to change stuff generally throughout my records. My music really started in a much more somber place. The more interesting journey probably is actually from the start of my career up to Any Human Friend and how I got from quite melancholy, poetic, abstract lyricism and getting to the point where I was writing these on-the-nose sex anthems.

In a way, what I’ve done with big Big Sigh is slightly come full circle. I’ve slightly inhabited that more intrinsic part of myself, just really focused on writing the songs. I wasn’t really thinking too much about how it was all going to sound. Whereas before, I’ve normally walked into records and been like, “I’m going to make a record that sounds like X, Y, and Z,” and I write songs to almost fit that brief. This time, I just sat down and wrote songs and then took them into the studio and kept it pretty simple and didn’t try to overthink things. I’ve gone in a big circle, but I’ve picked up all this stuff along the way, and then I’ve chalked it all together.

Was anyone upset when you got happier on Any Human Friend?

HACKMAN: Probably. I mean, I really like sad music. I like wistful music. I’m sure some people who’ve been with me since the start were like, “This is probably just not for me.” But no one’s said it to my face yet. So we’ll see. What we’ll see is when I put this one out and then everyone’s like, “Oh, thank God, you’re doing this again.”

There’s a line in the press release that compares the opening song to “Daydreaming” by Radiohead. Was that a direct influence?

HACKMAN: There was Radiohead influence on this album by virtue of my co-producer Sam Petts-Davies having actually worked with Thom Yorke, Radiohead, and the Smile. That was part of the reason I really wanted to work with him actually, because I felt like he could bring some of that wistful electronic kind of abstractness to it that I was looking for. But not direct influence. I love Radiohead, but it’s been a very, very long time since I’ve sat down and really had a good sesh.

Did the covers album inspire you for this album at all? “The Yellow Mile” gives me Elliott Smith vibes.

HACKMAN: Thank you. Nice compliment. I think doing the covers record was a real confidence boost in terms of production stuff and even carrying forward some of those things into demos that I was making was really useful. I learned a lot making that. My partner actually teaches a degree in music production, so she was really helpful, like downloaded loads of new plugins into my computer and was showing me how to use them.

I also feel like whenever you take someone else’s song, they’re like fingerprints, the way that you write — everyone will have different inherent ways that they write music and like the classic chords they’ll go to and the way they move around. It will feel really strange, like wearing the wrong size shoes. So I love it. When you take other people’s songs, you break them down and you build them back up again. You have to give a bit of your fingerprint into it. It definitely helps to absorb slightly different ways of doing things.

I think you can get stuck in harmonic ruts quite easily — stuff that feels good to you, so you do it over and over again — and it’s really nice to get pulled out of that. Even just feeling your hands working in a different way up a fretboard because someone’s chord progressions are just so not what your instincts would do. I think it’s a really useful thing to do. I’m sure that played a big part in when it came to even just the writing, regardless of the production for Big Sigh.

I also think it’s interesting how people have different reactions to covers. They’ll get angry if it sounds too much like the original song, and they’ll get angry if it sounds totally different. I personally love when it sounds totally different.

HACKMAN: Yeah, people get really protective. If I love a song, I like hearing it in more iterations. It’s just kind of like, “Oh, there’s even more of this for me to enjoy.” Because the song is still there.

The press release for Big Sigh mentions how you had a creative block and it was lifted when you were on the toilet.

HACKMAN: That’s actually a misprint. I don’t know why; maybe I didn’t double-check the last thing of the press release. It didn’t happen on the toilet. I keep getting asked about this. I basically had written a song at home and it was “Hanging” and I was really excited about it. For the first time, it was one that just flowed really naturally and I recorded it onto my phone. Then I went to the pub to meet my friends and I had a listen back in the bathroom a couple of hours later to see if I still liked it because it might have sounded like shit. Then I was really relieved because I really liked it and I was like “Fuck yes, I can still do this. I can still write music.”

It slightly greased the wheels for the writing of the rest of the record. But I didn’t write that on the loo. I wasn’t actually on the loo when I listened back either.

When it comes to creative block, do you believe in forcing yourself to write or do you just try to wait it out?

HACKMAN: It’s a balance. The thing is you’re never gonna write if you’re not sitting down trying to write. So the more of an environment you create for yourself where that can happen, e.g. sitting down every day and trying, the more likely it is you’re going to break the block. But I also think that time away from one’s desk is healthy and useful. Sometimes when I focus on doing something completely different, like if I do visual art stuff, making prints and things like that, then I really want to get back and get to my guitar. I feel like it makes me kind of hungry to sit down and write a track, rather than feel like I have to, which puts in a positive light.

Did you do the artwork for the album?

HACKMAN: No, it was a lovely man called Brian McHenry who lives in Ireland. I actually saw his stuff on Instagram, which isn’t particularly glamorous, but modern life. I thought it was really cool. I thought he really captured the exact vibe of the record. We got in contact and I sent him the album. We had some chats about what I was imagining. He just did a whole bunch of drawings for me. We managed to put that all together, and a bunch of different designs. So that worked out very nicely.

There’s a lot of nature visuals in the lyrics and in the music videos and there’s the mountains on the cover. Was that a theme that you went into the record thinking of?

HACKMAN: I didn’t go in thinking of it. But I think it’s there because it feels expansive and I’m always looking for like unifying, universal themes, and obviously nature, and then our own humanity and our own anatomical buildup and things like that, those are all unifying factors that we’re all familiar with. So they’re definitely topics that I sit back into quite a lot.

Certainly with the cover, those mountains there — it’s all about context, this record, you create the space, so you can remove the space, so if you create a vastness in the eyeline and then you put a perceived ugly trolley right in the front of it, you’re kind of creating that sense of depth. And it’s the same sonically. You can make it feel massive and sprawling, and then you can just have me suddenly singing into a microphone really close, like up in your ear. Dynamics in that way are really fun to play with and also arresting.

I wanted to ask more about the opening song. With all the strings it feels like the opening of a movie.

HACKMAN: That’s kind of how I wanted it to feel like I wrote that song. That song was written a year and a half before I even started writing the rest of the songs for the album. I was gonna try and turn it into a song and shoehorn that in and then I realized further down the line that I actually loved it how it was and there was no point pushing it. That was a big learning curve, because I think I’m always trying to force stuff into being a song because I love writing a perfect song. But actually having instrumentals now is such a relief going forward because I also love just coming up with what I think are beautiful melodies and to be able to just leave them without having to write lyrics on top of it or confuse things is a really exciting prospect.

Big Sigh is out 1/12 on Chrysalis Records.