Hailey Beavis – Whatever You Feel I Do Too

Purposefully or not, Hailey Beavis sums up the past few years in the raw exhaustion and flickering hope that suffuses her debut EP Whatever You Feel I Do Too. Five ethereal tracks switch between insistent buzzing guitars that drive ever forwards, and gently sanguine fingerpicking backing introspective lyricism.

Beavis’ background in folk sessions and musical storytelling is evident from the start, as traditional influences bend and sway around beautiful rhymes. Stranger Inside displays her masterful grip on narrative as Beavis sings about turning heartbreak into art, and whispers of fiddles float in and out of You’ve Got To Go's unrelenting force. 

Beavis has built a reputation for melding dizzying loops, shimmering harmonies and tumbling drums, and Whatever You Feel I Do Too is no exception. In Daybreak Will Destroy You, synths fire off warning shots amid thick, multilayered melodies. But her wordplay shines bright too. ‘I’m always at it, but what does that mean?’ is the song’s refrain – a sentiment many of us, particularly young women facing 2020 with beleaguered resolve, can relate to. In the same vein, there’s You’ve Got To Go’s ‘Almost immediately someone wants to fight me / Almost immediately I upset someone who really likes me’. It’s the voice of someone trying to figure things out.

And isn’t that what we need right now? Leaving behind a decade that imperceptibly turned the world into a scary and confusing place for many, it might be a good idea to begin the new decade with a record so full of fuck-you realism played off against pensive faith.

Listen to: Stranger Inside, You've Got To Go