The release opens with ‘Pinesol’, an off-kilter garage pop song that falls halfway between Screaming Females and Rilo Kiley, with instrumentation that stops and starts and pushes and pulls and generally seems incapable or unwilling to settle into any clear groove. Lyrically, the song deals with lost love and the general numbness which succeeds it (“needles fall and prick my feet / but they don’t feel a thing “). The second verse pushes into deeper territory, getting past simple pining and asking why we feel the way we do, becoming as much about introspection as it is about the now missing other.

“it’s not like you’re the one i miss
it’s the principle of it
all the story lines don’t fit in single file
what would you do different
if you knew you wouldn’t get
everything they promised
if you just stay still a bit longer”

‘New Ketamine’ is tight and tense, confronting the past and the way we cling to it, asking why tradition brings comfort even if it’s unhealthy. The guitars twitch through the song in neurotic claustrophobia, though eventually work loose so that the track unravels into something messy and sprawling and free. The peppy guitar of ‘Moonshine Kingdom’ follows, though while the instrumentation sounds bright the lyrics are anything but. “Comfort was killing me before I died,” sings lead Katie Capri, “sticking your head in the mud / pretend to breath you’re not alive”. Still, there’s enough force in the track to propel it through its darker imagery, no longer stuck in the mud but flying above it, frowning and snarling and challenging anyone who thinks differently.

“In a kingdom run on
moonshine and grapevines
tell yourself what you must to get by
but

if you’re going to
you’d better be right”

Hex Signs is out now and you can grab it via the Fern Mayo Bandcamp page.

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