Marika Hackman Makes the Music She Wants to Make

By Nadia S.Z. // Brooklyn, New York

“This might not be the kind of bop you were expecting,” Marika Hackman quips to the Brooklyn crowd. With half her band stranded in London waiting for visas, the UK-based singer-songwriter is playing the first shows of her North America tour more pared down than usual. “But then again,” she adds, “it is a Monday night.”

It’s a Monday night, but the venue is packed. Hackman’s first stateside tour since the pandemic follows the release of Big Sigh, her sixth album in a decade and her first in four years. And it really is a big sigh—a huge, hard-fought release of creative energy that hammers, and lulls, screams, and caresses. Though shorter than her previous albums, Big Sigh journeys across polarities. Songs visit lost lovers and broken beliefs, traveling from the enormous to the everyday as swiftly as Hackman shifts between cracking jokes with the audience and threading her voice through guitar, honey dipped in knife.

Speaking to me from her London apartment before she set off on tour, she discussed this capacity to hold myriad feelings in her music. “I always had this thing when I was a kid, I thought that salt and pepper canceled each other out. I thought if I put too much salt on my food, I could put more pepper on it, and it would cancel it out,” she said. “Of course a lot of stuff tasted like shit. But I think that’s something we think about with emotions. We’ll talk about how there’s a rainbow of emotions and you can feel them all, but I think everyone actually really thinks, ‘Oh well I’ll only feel one thing at a time.’ Like I’m either gonna be happy or sad or angry. Or like, loving someone and not wanting to be with them. The opposite of everything can always exist together.”

Hackman’s music has evolved many times over the past ten years, from her earlier impulse toward the abstract and imagistic to the explicitness and confessional candor of her last major release (Any Human Friend). In Big Sigh, the two collide: Gold is on the ground / I was happy for a while, she sings on the album’s opener, “The Ground.” Prismatic string arrangements fold around this repeated couplet, glittering and bare. Quieter laments like “Hanging” and “The Yellow Mile” play alongside bops like “No Caffeine” and “Big Sigh,” the title track, where Hackman’s alt-rock streak is at full volume.

The record’s eclecticism reflects the writing process. Hackman hasn’t shied away from talking about the struggle of getting Big Sigh out into the world. “Experiencing writer’s block, for want of a better word, is the nightmare really. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself off the back of Any Human Friend. I was riding sky high and I was very excited to write another record. And then COVID happened and everything shut down,” she explained. The result is a more interior, “diary-entry-style record,” material gathered over a longer period of time, songs that look inward and toward the past.

This bent toward interiority is noteworthy, given that outside of Big Sigh, lesbian pop music is having a moment. From Billie Eilish’s ode to eating out, “Lunch,” to Reneé Rapp’s Coachella performance on a set adorned with actual scissors, music that is boldly, vividly lesbian is out in force. And how thrilling, for a queer such as myself, to blast “What I Want” by MUNA while slut-walking down the streets of Brooklyn. But Hackman reminds us that it’s also a gay, permission-giving thrill for a queer artist—known for her outspokenly lesbian pop music—to release, amidst a lesbian pop frenzy, an album that’s kind of about everything.

What Hackman wants, plain and simple, is to make music. Sometimes that involves explicit talk of queer escapades and gay sex, but it doesn’t have to. “I’ve never felt duty-bound to talk about being queer,” she said. “I think that’s a really unhealthy attitude for people to get into. As a creative person, I feel like all you should be doing is making music that you want to make, that you think is good and reflects who you are.”

Hackman resists the queer artist pigeonhole, but she also owns her triumphs as a gay woman in an industry where she had to stand up for herself, especially coming up. “When I first started, everyone wanted to put me in a dress and very feminine makeup,” she told me. “People always wanted to make me look ‘sixties’ for some reason. And I did get cajoled into doing these things a few times, and then there’d be pictures flying around of me wearing an outfit you could tell I looked so uncomfortable in. I just learned to say no and put my foot down. And then started putting for makeup and clothing, ‘menswear’ and whatever you’d do makeup-wise for a boy. You don’t curl my fucking eyelashes.” (We agree that eyelash curlers are terrifying.)

I’m into the fact that with Big Sigh, and across her albums, Hackman tells us, again and again, I can want it all: these huge string sections, yes; this broody song about my ex, yes; this covers record with songs by The Shins and Radiohead and Beyoncé, yes; this rage anthem that obliterates the male gaze for diminishing eroticism between women as mere fetish—yes. At the show, this is what the audience is here for. All of it. Hackman picks deftly across new material and deeper cuts, and the crowd is transfixed. As she plays her early songs, it becomes clear to me that she was always attuned to some hidden frequency, even before she had the words to name it.

“I don’t think I’d found the language or the confidence to be super direct in terms of the feelings behind the music,” she said of that early material. But even then, she came across. Her capacity to voice intuition, to express desire that begins beyond language, is perhaps what first drew me into her music as an eighteen-year-old. Growing up closeted, somewhere between girlhood and boyhood in a small English river town, I found that Hackman’s thrumming, reverberant soundscape helped me to hear the longing inside me. Songs like “Plans” and “Cannibal” were thick with dirt, rain, hunger, blood; when I listened while running, six miles daily, along the banks of the Thames, desire burned in every muscle. Meanwhile, her music pushed breath into my lungs, sending me both beyond my body and deeper into what it knew but couldn’t say. 

I told Hackman that my closeted teenage self was drawn to her songs even before they made explicit mention of being gay. (I’m not alone in this; at the show, a gaggle of early-twenties fems bond over listening to Hackman’s music since they were teens.) “If I listen back to all of my music, particularly my first album, We Slept at Last, it is all there,” Hackman reflected. “Because that’s who I am and always have been. I’ve known I was gay as long as I can remember, so it’s sitting heavily in the music. So much of what I’m dealing with is about longing and yearning and lust and love.”

Life seems to pour into art for Hackman in this way. So it’s understandable that the four-year period between albums was a challenge. Preparing for our interview, I came across a blurb describing the wait for Big Sigh as a “creative dry spell.” The turn of phrase seemed harsh to me. Leave Marika alone, I thought. But it turns out, the desire to produce and release music with consistency is all hers. So is the frustration when things dry up, or take longer than expected.

As she described the protracted process of creating, producing, and finally releasing Big Sigh, her head flopped cartoonishly into her hand. “It was long and that was very frustrating. It was such a relief getting it out in January and being able to have a dialogue with it, and people reacting to it, and releasing it from myself basically.”

I wonder if it’s this process of release that allows her to arrive on stage with such apparent ease. And to perceive her artistic life with ease, and clarity, too. The equation of her existence, she explained, is simple: music is life. “If I can keep doing this, and I can keep living on this, then that’s really it,” she said. “I’m thirty-two. I would love it if I turned forty and I’ve got maybe three, four more records under my belt.”

Even as she gestured toward a world that’s getting crazier and more expensive, and toward the responsibilities that come with early-thirties adulthood, I sensed these are small potatoes to her. The assuredness she emanates is rooted in a deeper kind of self-knowing. “I’m a very trusting person,” she confided. “I’m very much trusting in this process, and I’m very much trusting in my career and the team around me to facilitate me being able to do this. Because I have faith that I make good music. If I just keep going, that’s the main thing.”

It’s exciting to imagine what kind of music Hackman might create in the wake of Big Sigh. This album brings every aspect of her artistry into the present, making the future feel limitless. In a music industry increasingly ruled by TikTok, she’s carved out a niche for herself where she can buck the trend, and fans will follow. The Brooklyn show feels intimate, caught in a kind of spell not only because Hackman plays much of it solo, just her and her guitar. She is here to make music. And people bring themselves, heart and soul, to listen. 

Listen to Marika Hackman on Spotify