hexed! begins with aya striking herself using the machinery that was supposed to provide escape. “I am the pipe I hit myself with” opens in a burst of crushed rhythm, strangled electronics and a voice moving between muttered recollection, theatrical accusation and full-bodied scream. The title turns an instrument for consuming a drug into an instrument of punishment. There is no outside attacker required. Addiction has folded the user, weapon and victim into the same figure.
The track also introduces the album’s supernatural language. aya describes being kissed by a witch, placed under suspicion and driven into something resembling a hunt. The imagery reaches back toward her adolescence in a Pentecostal church, where intense music and bodily sensation were interpreted as evidence of the Holy Spirit until queerness transformed her from believer into perceived contamination. hexed! does not separate religious ecstasy from chemical ecstasy cleanly. Both involve altered states, repetition, submission and the desire to have unbearable feeling explained by a force larger than the self.
The title suggests that addiction is a spell cast from outside, yet the album repeatedly complicates that excuse. To be hexed is to be acted upon, but aya remains aware of her own participation in the damage. The music lives inside that contradiction. Beats lurch forward with enormous conviction, then collapse as though ashamed of where they were going. Voices multiply, mock and interrupt one another. Every moment of control creates another mechanism capable of turning against its maker.
“off to the ESSO” relocates the supernatural drama to a petrol station. The track is funny, quick and deeply local, built from geographical references, slang and the strange nighttime clarity of walking through a city while exhausted or altered. A service station becomes destination, landmark, refuge and miniature social universe.
The rhythm keeps changing shape beneath aya’s delivery. Drum sounds strike with the force of hardcore and grime but refuse a dependable grid. Synthetic bass bends until it resembles sheet metal being dragged through a stairwell. The track moves like someone who knows the route while no longer trusting perception.
That instability is central to aya’s production. She does not merely combine genres by placing a distorted guitar sound over a techno beat. Her synthetic instruments seem to possess weight, elasticity and bad intentions. Percussion buckles after impact. Bass stretches beyond its expected dimensions. Voices behave like surfaces that can be scratched, liquefied or folded.
“the names of Faggot Chav boys” confronts classification directly. Its title gathers two insults, one directed toward sexuality and the other toward class, style and regional identity. aya does not reclaim them by sanding away their hostility. She keeps the words ugly and makes them collide.
The vocal delivery carries the snapping timing of grime, playground taunting and spoken-word performance. Names and identities become things shouted across streets, remembered after humiliation or worn deliberately before someone else can use them as weapons. The song’s short duration makes it feel like an encounter rather than a developed narrative.
hexed! is saturated with place. Huddersfield, Manchester and London appear not as tasteful documentary scenery but as routes, petrol stations, rooms, pavements, parties and transit points. Movement between cities does not produce a clean new identity. Earlier versions of aya remain attached to each location, and the album seems constantly to run into them.
“heat death” enlarges the scale from neighborhood memory to cosmic extinction. The scientific phrase describes a theoretical state in which usable energy has been exhausted and no meaningful work can continue. aya turns that total depletion into personal atmosphere.
The track pounds forward, but its energy feels doomed to spend itself. Metal-like eruptions and electronic screams gather around a rhythm whose intensity cannot prevent eventual collapse. Addiction produces a similar false infinity. The next night, next dose or next peak appears capable of restarting the system while actually reducing what remains available.
“peach” is one of the album’s most exposed songs. Its textures soften, but softness does not create safety. A melodic figure glows beneath aya’s voice while small digital disturbances keep opening inside it. The title promises sweetness, flesh and ripeness, yet the music treats tenderness as something easily bruised.
This is where hexed! becomes more than a brilliantly designed crisis simulator. aya can write emotional movement that does not depend upon impact. Her quieter sounds retain unusual physicality. A soft tone is not merely pretty; it seems to occupy vulnerable tissue. A vocal effect does not conceal the person singing; it reveals how unstable the boundary around that person has become.
The title track pushes this fragility into a wider cinematic space. “hexed!” begins almost as a reprieve, allowing long tones and voice to gather without immediate attack. The spell is no longer represented through frenzy alone. It becomes suspension, the feeling of remaining inside a condition after the dramatic event has passed.
This quieter center reveals the album’s narrative shape. The first half behaves like active crisis: movement, accusation, intoxicated geography and punishment. After the title track, the music begins examining residue. The body is no longer only being struck. It is listening to what continues vibrating afterward.
“droplets” is delicate without becoming decorative. Small sounds fall into a large dark field, and aya’s voice carries a careful intimacy absent from the album’s opening attacks. Droplets suggest rain, sweat, tears, condensation or a substance being measured in small amounts. The source remains unclear, allowing the image to move between healing and relapse.
The track’s beauty is strengthened by the surrounding abrasion. hexed! does not use a ballad as proof that aya possesses a gentler side. Gentleness is another extreme condition, requiring the music to expose itself without the armor of maximal distortion.
“navel gazer” turns introspection into self-mockery. Navel-gazing is usually an accusation that someone has become trapped inside their own thoughts and experiences. On an album this personal, the term could be defensive, acknowledging the risk before anybody else points it out.
But looking inward is not presented as indulgent luxury. aya’s internal world is crowded by religious shame, chemical compulsion, gendered scrutiny, social memory and panic. The navel is also a bodily scar marking an earlier physical connection. To stare at it is to confront dependency, separation and the evidence that the self did not begin independently.
“The Petard is my Hoister” mangles Shakespeare’s phrase about being “hoist with his own petard,” meaning destroyed by one’s own explosive device. aya turns the passive consequence into possession. The petard is not merely what causes the hoisting; it becomes the hoister, an active companion in self-destruction.
The track’s sound follows that linguistic knot. Rhythms appear to launch themselves upward and detonate beneath their own structures. Voice, bass and percussion compete for control, producing a grotesque mechanical comedy. It is one of the album’s clearest examples of aya’s ability to make suffering funny without reducing its seriousness.
Humor matters throughout hexed! because addiction stories can easily become solemn monuments to damage. aya refuses that prestige. Slang, literary jokes, ugly laughter and ridiculous sonic gestures keep the album attached to social life. Even the worst period contains petrol-station errands, badly timed observations and language made funny because despair has exhausted ordinary dignity.
“Time at the Bar” closes the record by slowing the machinery. The title can mean time spent drinking, a deadline at closing, imprisonment, legal judgment or standing before an obstacle. Every meaning suggests that movement has reached a boundary.
The track returns toward the landscape of aya’s youth, where moors, roads, religion and memory gather without forming a sentimental homecoming. Home is not one stable place waiting to welcome her back. It is a shifting collection of locations, voices and earlier selves, some nurturing and others dangerous.
The closing music does not announce recovery as victory. Sobriety appears less like a clean spell-break than the difficult process of recognizing how the spell was constructed. The rhythms no longer need to imitate liberation through endless acceleration. Space begins appearing around the voice.
That space distinguishes hexed! from im hole. The earlier album often sounded submerged inside the altered state it documented, its rhythms and language bending through chemical dissociation. hexed! looks back with greater clarity, but clarity does not make the experience orderly. The memories remain vivid enough to distort the present.
aya’s vocal performance is the album’s most important instrument. She raps, whispers, mutters, screams, recites and sings without arranging these methods into separate characters. They are pressures passing through one body. Heavy processing stretches the voice while preserving its grain, making even the most synthetic transformations feel intimate.
The album’s club relationship is equally complicated. These tracks contain rhythm, bass and recognizable traces of techno, grime, footwork and UK soundsystem music, but they rarely offer the body a reliable agreement. A pattern may lock into place just long enough for movement to begin, then snap sideways.
That refusal is not anti-dance. It recognizes the dance floor as a site of pleasure, transformation, danger, repetition and compulsion. aya has described chasing intensity through rave culture until the chase became dark. hexed! preserves the physical knowledge of that environment without pretending every form of surrender was freedom.
Its metal and hardcore influence works similarly. Distortion, screamed vocals and sudden rhythmic violence are not decorative signs of aggression. They carry memories of adolescent catharsis, religious intensity and music experienced as overwhelming bodily proof.
Eli Gromova-Gulbe’s artwork and Dee Iskrzynska’s photography place aya within a similarly unstable visual world. The cover does not offer a clean portrait announcing self-possession. The body appears processed by color, surface and distortion, held somewhere between fashion image, digital wound and supernatural evidence.
The exclamation mark in hexed! is important. It prevents the title from becoming purely mournful. The word is cried out, joked about or announced with theatrical force. aya has survived long enough to turn the condition into form, but the album does not pretend form has neutralized it.
What makes hexed! exceptional is the precision beneath its apparent chaos. Every collision has weight. Voices enter at exact angles. Rhythmic failures are timed with enough control to feel physically inevitable. The record sounds unhinged because aya has become extraordinarily skilled at designing hinges that break on command.
The album ends without proving that the curse has been lifted. Its stronger claim is that the curse can be examined, named, sampled, distorted and rebuilt into something whose direction no longer belongs entirely to it.
The pipe remains visible. The bruises remain. The church, petrol station, club, moor and damaged rooms remain. But aya has taken the machinery that once organized the harm and made it answer to her.
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