We are delighted to première ‘Destroy’, a track from Henoheno’s forthcoming album I Made These Songs Before I Moved.
Details about Henoheno are scarce. We know that he is based in Japan, but that he wrote this album before leaving wherever he was pre-Japan (hence the title). Aaaand… that’s about it. ‘Destroy’ is a lo-fi bedroom pop song with misleadingly chirpy instrumentation and some rather dark lyrics. Imprisoned within the adolescent cell of Home, the narrator deals with suffocating anxiety and dread, denouncing his situation and pleading for help:
“I hate my parents they really fuck me over. I just want to leave this house.
I hate my family they really fuck me over. Don’t want to see them ever again.
Get me out, get me out, I can’t say it enough. Get me out, get me out ‘cause living here is tough.
I go out, I go out, the stress is killing me. I go out, I go out where nobody knows me.”
With it’s imperfect instrumentation and candid, painfully honest lyrics, Henoheno has more than a bit in common with Coma Cinema. Here unbearable emotional suffering is presented in a detached manner, as if the narrator has transcended into an outer body experience or else knows the pain so well it lacks the immediacy it once possessed. The talk of drastic action in the strangely catchy chorus only furthers this sense of dissociation between the narrator’s body and self:
“I stopped that feeling but it has come back. I feel like shit and I just want to destroy myself”
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The album might not be the easiest of listens, but will speak to many who feel alone and afraid and in need of connection. In a world where social media pushes photoshopped portraits and misleadingly exciting lives, artists like Henoheno are needed to remind us just how hard life can be.
I Made These Songs Before I Moved will be released on the 2nd of July on Fox Food Records. You can pre-order it now via Bandcamp, both digitally or on limited edition cassette tapes (which are a lovely pea green, see below).
