aya
Hyperdub
28th March 2025
aya’s hexed! emerges from the detritus of memory, withdrawal, and the hazy tail-end of late-capitalist nightlife. It’s created in the white heat of early sobriety, memory, and hallucinatory blur – like club culture reimagined as purgatory: claustrophobic, flashing, and frayed at the edges of feeling.
This isn’t Northern grit as romantic mythology but as lived trauma – post-industrial decay where the rave eats itself. The album documents not the peak-time euphoria but the grey-light aftermath, and the confessionalism spills out as psychic graffiti: “fuck off back to ladbroke grove”, “I’m sizzled sozzled, hen”. Lines are barked or slurred, half-chant, half-threat.
Her references – Huddersfield bus stops, chav culture, the crumbling masculinity of lads’ mag Britain – are cultural residue reworked into avant-noise collage. The personal is political, but here it’s also painfully local. Huddersfield and Manchester appear not as places but as symptoms of a broader malaise – damp, melancholic, and haunted by their historical narratives. “It’s the last call for Ladybarn” might as well be a curse. In this landscape, the rave becomes less of an escape than an echo, with lyrics looping like 4 a.m. ruminations. Track “Off to the ESSO” conjures spectral adolescence – mascara-streaked, ash-burned, feral with longing – a glitching map of disordered time and emotional backwash, not a linear narrative.
aya’s sound design functions as a kind of archaeology, each processed scream excavated from the debris of shattered experiences. Closer, “Time at the bar”, ends abruptly – a flatlined nightmare cutting to silence. She leaves us suspended between understanding and endurance as hexed! catalogues the damage that lingers through transformation. She maps the territory but promises no safe passage – the hex remains active, albeit better understood.