Based in Manchester, Lindsay Munroe is a singer songwriter who works at the indie rock end of the genre a la Sharon Van Etten or Marika Hackman. In May, Munroe will release her debut record, Our Heaviness, a five song EP produced by Chris Hamilton (LUMP, Torres) and featuring The Big Moon’s Fern Ford.
In anticipation, Munroe has released the EP’s first single. ‘Mirror’ is an impressive introduction, imbued with both self-confidence and a furious defiance, a song that explores personal insecurities, particularly around the pressures forced upon women and girls. “The track is about being pissed off by my own insecurity, basically,” Monroe tells She Makes Music. “It came from gaining some confidence, looking back on the ways I used to try and shrink myself to fit unrealistic ideals and expectations and feeling absolute rage at the fact I ever felt I had to do that.”
Built on insistent percussion and dynamic guitar, the song captures this complex emotion by sounding at once upbeat and angry, Munroe’s strong vocals whipping around with real feeling. It confronts the feelings Munroe felt in the past to conform to a series of equally unreasonable and unrealistic ideals, how she once aspired to be malleable according to what others wanted her to be. “I used to wish that I was made of clay,” she sings, “to be moved and moulded every day, to smooth and then to shrink away.”
The track comes complete with a video by Wigan-based AGAS Film, which plays on the central metaphor. It shows Munroe at the centre of a stuffy pottery class, until she starts making mischief and all hell breaks loose in glorious rebellion. Check it out below:
Our Heaviness is set for release on 8th May. Keep an eye on the Lindsay Munroe Facebook page for more.
Photo by Billy Holmes